


Darkness is Another Light

by RurouniHime



Series: Sarah-verse [3]
Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst, Arguing, Battle, Brooding, Domestic Avengers, Domestic Disputes, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Established Relationship, Extremis, Fatherhood, Growing Pains, Homecoming, Hurt Steve, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Injury Recovery, Kid Fic, M/M, Major Character Injury, Mutants, Parenthood, Steve Angst, Steve Has Issues, Superfamily, Superhusbands, Teamwork, Tony Angst, Tony Has Issues, Unsatisfying Sex, Whump
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-05-05
Updated: 2016-04-03
Packaged: 2018-01-22 00:46:15
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 29,049
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1569785
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RurouniHime/pseuds/RurouniHime
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Some truths take a long time to surface.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prelude

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Not One of Blood](https://archiveofourown.org/works/961678) by [RurouniHime](https://archiveofourown.org/users/RurouniHime/pseuds/RurouniHime). 



> This is the threequel of the Sarah!verse, after [Not One of Blood](http://archiveofourown.org/works/961678/chapters/1884687) and [Wherever I Find Myself](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1427317/chapters/3000364). It takes place after the Avengers have returned to Earth and properly avenged the hell out of things.
> 
> I am not including all tags and characters at this point in the interest of keeping the story spoiler-free, but I will add them as they become relevant. **I promise right now though that there is no character death in this fic.** So, no worries.
> 
> Again, not updating as often as the first fic. Prior commitments! RL, you fiend.

As soon as he sees the gaping holes in the tower’s façade, he’s glad he chose the suit he did.

Whole chunks of masonry are gone, and the space where the penthouse windows used to be looks like a meandering grin missing all its teeth. Electrical cabling, now dead, knocks steadily against the framework in the wind. Sunlight illuminates what’s left of the living room, the inner walls seared black in wide swathes, broken furniture and blasted pictures scattered on the wood flooring. One frame teeters on the lip where the ground drops away over Manhattan, its photograph long blown away.

Tony’s stomach rolls. He bypasses the penthouse, flying easily instead into the black hole that is the lab. He touches down and the floor groans ominously, but this suit is nothing but an outer shell and not heavy enough to upset the balance. He’s glad he never throws anything away.

He was afraid it would be a gamble, where to step and where to avoid, but after the initial protest, the floor doesn’t complain all that much. He flicks the faceplate back but keeps the helmet on. If the place does collapse, he’ll be up and out in a second, and the people at the site below have already been warned to keep clear.

It’s the work of a moment to right the main terminal. Plugging it in takes a bit more finesse—the equivalent of a down and dirty hotwire job—but Tony knows his systems. The terminal’s visual interface is, of course, shot, but the important parts inside seem to be mostly intact. Tony splices what is necessary to get it up and running, knocks out a few quick fix codes, then steps back, looking around like Steve used to do. “You there, JARVIS?”

One of the speakers lets out a series of clicks. “I am, sir. And may I say, it is a true pleasure to hear your voice again.”

He expected the relief, but not the dizzying intensity. “Likewise, J. You alright?”

“Initial diagnostics have resulted normally now that I have connected to the reserve power grid.” A whir, more clicking. The speakers up here are just about gone. “I have accessed multiple media sources and updated the emergency cloud server. How is Sarah? The captain?”

“Safe and sound, anxious to get home again.” Which… isn’t going to be for a while. Tony sighs at the room in general. “Gonna have you hop into the handheld later. Sarah misses you.”

“I would be honored to accompany you when you depart for the evening. Meanwhile, what may I do to assist you here?”

Tony wets his lips. “Are the kids…”

“Charging at the time of the attack. The static-induction shielding performed admirably, sir, though Butterfingers has sustained damage to his auxiliary arm coupling. Dummy will require extensive cleaning in his circuit board’s cooling system, but all three robots are functional. They are, however, unable to activate without the main grid.”

“Just as well.” He doesn’t know if he can handle the bleeping when Dummy gets a look at this place, or You’s sad puppy slump. “Run a check on all systems you can still get your claws into. Let me know if we have any uninvited bugs.”

JARVIS dutifully reports on each system as he completes his scans, and Tony sets to clearing a space for work. After two weeks of sorting through the bureaucracy of destruction, and the much more sobering task of paying restitution, getting his hands into the physical _work_ of fixing the situation holds a desperate kind of appeal. 

He doesn’t know if he can sign another check like that, doesn’t know if he can stand there on another front stoop, hand a piece of paper to someone who lost family because the Avengers have enemies, and know that it means nothing in comparison, no matter how many zeroes there are.

The place is in so many chunks that nothing is particularly hard to lift, but the floor has definitely seen better days. By the time he has enough room to properly use the display portables, JARVIS has cleared the entire system, except for the archives that locked down and scrambled when the attack first began. 

Tony taps the closest portable. “Can you get these things running? I want a full structural assessment.” He probably shouldn’t be thunking around in here at all, no matter how lean the suit.

The beams flash on, sending dust motes glittering. After a moment or two of sweeping— “Structural integrity of this floor is currently at sixty percent. The penthouse is unsafe for occupation of any kind, as is the north façade of the floor directly below, with seventy-three percent structural integrity in the rooms supporting the lab.” 

“What about further down?”

“The next level with one hundred percent structural integrity is the communal kitchen and theater.”

After that, the Tower gets sounder and sounder as it heads earthward, but Tony already fears he’ll end up rebuilding it from the foundation. He’s not sure he’ll ever feel safe in a structure that took such an appalling beating, and putting his family back into it—his entire family—is out of the question. 

And Tony has more important places to be right now, and better uses for his time. He takes off his right gauntlet and hooks the wrist node into the main terminal’s outlet. “JARVIS, pack everything up and hop in.”

“Assembling all data will take approximately seven minutes.”

Tony heads to where the outer wall detonated, looks out over the city and tries to recall that visceral punch of rocketing Sarah out of there, scraping past drone after drone, repulsing like a bat out of hell. Trying to get clear. But it’s like a film he watched, his fingers grasping short of the tangible. He can’t get at it.

“Sir?” JARVIS ventures.

Tony hums.

“If you are not averse, may I run a medical diagnostic as well?”

“Getting jumpy, old man?”

“On the contrary. I am collating previously collected data.”

Tony turns, eyebrows raised. “Been fixed by Asgardians. If something’s still wrong, I think I’d have to buy it a beer and congratulate it.”

“For my peace of mind, if you please.”

Tony rolls his eyes and submits, moving away from the windows. At least JARVIS asked before carrying on. Though, if he wants a blood test, he’ll have to wait for functioning equipment. Tony sorts through a mess of broken console glass, finding nothing in its innards that can be completely salvaged, but at least one primary circuitry core that ought to have workable parts.

The whirring and clicking stops—and maybe he won’t fix anything about these speakers after all; best way to tell if JARVIS is noodling around behind his back—but JARVIS says nothing. 

“So?” Tony prompts.

“You are well, sir.” 

Damn it if his AI doesn’t sound relieved. Tony frowns. “JARVIS.”

“It is my understanding that sixty-three days have passed since the assault on the tower.”

“About that, yeah.”

“And have you undergone extensive treatment at the hands of our allies?”

“If ‘extensive’ is the new term for slapping an interstellar band-aid on it…” He trails off.

JARVIS pauses. “Am I correct in assuming that you do not recall receiving injuries during your flight from the tower?”

Well, nothing that warranted this sort of interrogation. “JARVIS, what?”

“It would indeed appear that you are sound,” JARVIS decides at last. “Which does not correspond to all previously gathered data. Extremis notwithstanding, it is difficult to ascertain where the discrepancy lies. Perhaps a system malfunction is the culprit.”

Tony crosses the room. “Are you saying I was injured flying out of here?”

“Not during the initial attack, no. If you’ll remember, I was fully linked via Extremis up until power began to fail and backup systems were initiated. This occurred—”

“In Philadelphia.” Tony remembers _that._ He remembers the harsh fluorescents in the corner store, the display window exploding inward, and the terror on Sarah’s face.

“My records indicate that you experienced severe cardiac fluctuations during that encounter, as well as pulmonary and other cardiovascular distress.”

Tony stills, one hand stretching for the gauntlet. “Cause?” 

“Without full scans and tissue samples during the incident itself, I cannot draw a conclusion about the reasons for these results. Only that, had they continued without intervention from Extremis, you would have lost kidney function within twenty-seven seconds and gone into cardiac arrest within thirty-three seconds.” 

“I was shot in the side. I remember that.”

“That was recorded as well, and subsequently repaired by Extremis within ten-point-six seconds. These system-wide results remain outside the purview of a wound caused by such a projectile.”

“And you say I’m fine now?”

“Entirely, sir. In undeniably good health.”

“Huh.” What had he been doing then? For the life of him, all he can remember clearly is guarding Sarah and shooting back. “Can you retrieve the archived data from those scans and extrapolate?”

“I can. With the main system compromised, it will require some time. I shall begin immediately.”

Tony leaves the gauntlet where it is and sets about gathering everything he might be able to use later, settling it in the most stable corner of the lab. When he’s done, he collapses the portable scanners and reattaches them to the back of the suit, then clanks his way into the elevator shaft and rises up one level using his repulsors. The shaft itself is warped, the top open like a blown out castle turret. Above, the sky is blue with wisps of clouds. Tony hovers at the level of the penthouse, but doesn’t dare touch down.

There is so little of the hallway floor left that Tony can count the support beams beneath, and the insulation between them. The sprinkler system came on at some point—the broken planks are swollen—but the fire damage was extensive. The kitchen looks completely charred, and there is light shining into the hall through Sarah’s doorway, too much of it to be explained away by mere windows. 

The master bedroom is... gone. 

Tony’s stomach lurches unexpectedly and he wavers, half turning away in the shaft. He’d known it would be a mess, but he’d thought… Well. He doesn’t have to look now. He’ll come back with Steve, see if… if there’s anything they can save.

He feels better as soon as he sinks back to the lab level, and so keeps going; the feeling expands in direct relation to each foot he drops, it seems, and he forces the doors open two levels below the lab: Natasha’s floor.

“Sir,” JARVIS says as he climbs out onto stable ground, “there is no determinable cause of the injuries you sustained in the archived records. Neither do they appear to have been caused by a microbial or chemical component.”

“So… you have no explanation for it.”

“I have no explanation for it.”

“Okay. So I was dying. And now I’m not?”

“To put it crudely, sir.”

“And you didn’t tell me then, because?”

“Given our limited resources at the time, and the fact that your health situation had been resolved to my satisfaction, I felt it prudent to wait until a more appropriate opportunity presented itself.”

I.e., he’d been fine, Extremis had screwed enough with his brain already, and he’d had Sarah to deal with. And then the suit’s power had been all but gone. Still, it’s not particularly comforting knowledge. “Any detail scanners still working up here?”

JARVIS is silent for a moment. “The one in the southeast corner of Clint Barton and Phil Coulson’s bedchamber appears to be functional, sir.”

It’s quicker to jet back out the window and come around. Clint’s apartment is another floor down, and amazingly intact, even if the floor-to-ceiling windows are all shattered. Tony drops down onto the crunch of broken glass. Clint and Phil’s curtains whip in the wind, and half the quilt blows back under the draft of his entrance, but compared to the rest of the tower, the room looks pretty normal. Even the glass is hard to see, given the shade of the carpet. Just a nice day with the windows open.

He clanks his way to the southeast corner, tossing pieces of the suit toward the bed as JARVIS awakens the camera. The cool blue of the scanning beam buzzes and flickers at first, but holds steady all the way down the length of his body and back up again. Tony turns dutifully three times, offering all angles, arms stretched out to his sides. Finally the thing shuts off.

“Lay it on me, honey bean.”

“As before, you are well, sir.”

A relief, if mysterious. But he’s been a parent for a while now; he’ll take what peace he can get while he has it and tackle the rest as it comes. “Jump on back upstairs. I want all of your records in the suit’s mainframe.”

“Understood.”

He jets up to the lab one last time to grab the gauntlet, but his mind is already done with this burnt out shell, moving on to the flight ahead of him. He has people he desperately wants to get back to.

Tony leaps out the broken row of windows, still fastening the gauntlet into place. The sun is setting in creams and golds. Almost dinnertime. The thought strums giddily at his heart rate. As he directs toward Pepper’s home, he rolls his eyes at himself. God, he can’t even go two hours without them these days.

~tbc~


	2. Countdown

_Six years later_

 

“Maybe I shouldn’t go. I think I’m sick.”

“Hmm.” Tony flips Sarah’s egg and leans over to grab her toast. “JARVIS?”

Sarah jerks upright, her mouth opening, but JARVIS is already responding. “Sarah’s vitals show no elevated temperature, heart rate or respiration. Digestive processes are within normal limits, as are histamine levels and mucous production.”

“Cheating,” Sarah grumbles, glowering at her orange juice.

“Pumpkin, it’s nerves, alright? You’re going to be fine. But you need to go. You have an obligation to those kids.”

“I’m only a junior counselor, they won’t know the difference,” Sarah says. “Thanks for nothing, JARVIS.”

“You have expressed considerable excitement to me over the past week regarding this event, Sarah,” JARVIS says tentatively.

Sarah’s shrug is dismissive, and Bruce chuckles from where he stands at the other stove, spraying down the griddle for his weird rabbit food pancakes. “Don’t forget, I’ll be over there later on,” he offers. “We can get lunch.”

Sarah gives him a wan smile. She does look a little green around the gills as Tony sets her plate in front of her. “Just don’t feel right,” she mutters.

“Look,” Tony says, “you’ll get there, be uncomfortable for about five minutes, and then everyone will be talking and laughing and misplacing gardening equipment en masse, and you’ll be great again. You’ll plant a million trees and forget all about us. You won’t even remember to call home when you finish up for the day, and your dad will have to go over there with his ID and convince people he’s your legal guardian and has every right to go buy you a hamburger at McDonald’s.”

Sarah snorts just as Steve walks in, looking like—Tony sets down the pan he was about to put in the sink and looks him over. “Well. Hi, there.”

This time Steve is the one to snort. “Morning.” He takes the mug of coffee Bruce hands him and heads for the refrigerator. He’s in his SHIELD armor, white stripes on navy blue, the jacket hugging his frame before it gives way to utilitarian trousers and boots. “Morning, kiddo,” he adds as he passes the table.

Sarah gestures. “See, Dad’s still here, he could take me over.”

“Sorry, I actually need to bug out of here...” Steve looks at his watch. “Jeez, two minutes ago. I thought you were grabbing the subway?”

Whatever she answers is too low for Tony to make out, but Steve, despite his schedule, turns to face her. “What’s up?”

“I don’t want to go anymore.”

“I think you’ll have fun.” He drops a kiss on Sarah’s forehead, still holding his coffee, and it’s the mug Tony’s eye is on, the odd slosh of the liquid inside when Steve stills, standing over Sarah. Steve blinks, brow creasing and eyes going a little unfocused. Tony mouths, _What?_ but Steve just shakes his head and gives him a smile.

“Why can’t you guys come with me?”

“I’m out for the weekend, you know that. And your pop has meetings that, for once, he can’t get out of.”

“Please, I could run the audit conference from our bathtub.”

“And yet.” Steve leans against the counter, coffee in hand, and studies Sarah. Tony just wants to drag his fingers through Steve’s bangs over and over again. “Look, you’re going down into Grand Central and taking the 6 to 96th Street, then you’re walking right down the road to Central Park. We’ve done it together at least five times.”

“Can’t I just have Happy drive me?”

“No,” Tony cuts in, “and if you call him and beg him like you did last time, you’re in big trouble. That’s not his job anymore.” It’s hard enough letting her ride the subway alone, though he knows there are tons of younger kids who use it daily to get back and forth to school with no problem at all. She’s been thirteen for three months, it’s summer, it’s broad daylight. JARVIS will be in her phone, and Clint will tail her anyway without her ever knowing it, because Steve conveniently neglected to warn him off. Tony doesn’t need Sarah agreeing with him all of a sudden, making it too easy to back out of the whole thing.

“There’s a restaurant over there,” Bruce puts in. “On Madison. They serve the best peshwari naan I’ve ever tasted outside of Andhra Pradesh. If you want, we can eat there.”

Sarah hides it, but Tony can see how she perks up at that. “Okay.”

For a few seconds, the kitchen falls quiet. Tony wipes down the range and gets himself a glass of orange juice.

“Gotta run,” Steve sighs at last, pushing off the counter. “Text me about your first day, honey. I’ll call you back as soon as I can.” He holds out his arms and she gets up, folding herself into them. Steve gives her a long squeeze, pressing his nose into her hair.

When she releases him, he steps back... and sways. Tony frowns. “Steve?”

He opens his mouth, his hand still on Sarah’s shoulder for balance that he shouldn’t need, looks at Tony confusedly, then pushes Sarah back a little. “Kiddo, I think you’d better—”

And drops, right in the middle of the floor, knocking Sarah’s chair skittering. Steve lands hard; the mug crashes into shards, and coffee spatters Tony’s pants. Sarah leaps away, bumping the table, but Tony is already lunging to his knees. “Steve! Babe?”

He gets Steve’s face in both hands and finds his skin clammy and cool, cheeks gone gray. Tony hears his breath rattle. He grabs for Steve’s collar, unzipping the suit and pulling it away from his throat. “JARVIS?”

“My readings indicate extreme pulmonary and respiratory distress. Initiating emergency—”

Tony’s deep in Extremis already, pinging SHIELD’s emergency medics. By the time he pulls back out, Bruce is kneeling beside him, fingers pressed to Steve’s wrist. 

“Thready,” Bruce reports. He pries Steve’s mouth open, a considerable feat given the way Steve’s jaw is clenched. “Airway looks clear. He have anything besides the coffee?”

“His usual breakfast, hours ago.” Steve is breathing, but it’s labored, god, is it ever. Tony can’t remember him having this much trouble during the worst of their battles. “J, tap in. Sarah, hand me your sweater—Sarah.”

Sarah jerks to life from where she’s staring down at Steve. She grabs the sweater off the back of her chair just as JARVIS slips into Tony’s head, leaving a ripple of vertigo in his wake. Tony folds the sweater under Steve’s nape and lays him gently back onto it, only to hear the rasp worsen. “Okay, honey, I need you to go get Aunt Ta—”

“Sir, his left lung is collapsing.”

“The _hell?”_ Steve’s face turns even grayer, and now Tony’s the one having trouble breathing. Bruce grabs Steve’s other wrist, then puts an ear to his chest.

“Can’t find his pulse anymore,” he says, very quietly.

Aerosol? No, they’d all be feeling it, Bruce would have hulked out by now. Tony knows with a single glance through the Tower’s systems that no one is anywhere they shouldn’t be. No bugs, no invaders, nothing he can get his hands on, and yet Steve is—yes, that’s a seizure, and Tony has no fucking idea what’s causing it. “JARVIS, get the others up here, now! Steve, come on, baby, don’t do this.” He grabs the towel hanging off the oven bar and works it between Steve’s teeth.

“I have something in the lab, should be strong enough.” Bruce jumps up and dashes for the door, and Sarah settles into his place. 

“Daddy?” Her voice wobbles. She wraps her fingers around Steve’s hand.

Steve jerks right off the floor, his back arcing clear. Sarah screams and jumps back, her face a rictus. Tony loses his grip and Steve’s head cracks hard against the tile before he can stabilize him. In the doorway, Bruce freezes. “What—”

“Sir,” JARVIS interrupts with urgency, “these ailments exactly match the progression of events I detected during Encounter PH26.”

All in all, it’s only an iota of a second: Tony’s brain shatters the idea into bits and rifles the pieces faster than even he can keep track. He’s been over and over what happened in Philadelphia, circling back when he’s got free time, dividing it all up and teasing at that one inexplicable night. What’s in common, what’s here that was there besides he himself? No suit this time, no danger. There: drones, only his body between his daughter and a thousand piercing rounds. Here: Steve, Steve standing in their kitchen drinking coffee, just a normal morning, bending to comfort Sarah. The pieces fall faster, jamming into place one after the other, Extremis sealing the cracks, and just as Bruce reaches for a crying Sarah, it slams home with a cavernous bang, oh god, oh _god,_ that’s why it happened, that’s why Tony was okay, he had Extremis, but Steve does not, and—

“No!” But it’s too late, too late, fuck, no, _JARVIS, CONTAIN BRUCE._

The field snaps up practically through Bruce’s outstretched hand, sizzling his fingertips. Sarah scrambles backward, staring openmouthed up at Bruce—who stares openmouthed at Tony, and just at that moment, Sam and Natasha barrel into the kitchen.

“What the hell happened?” Sam demands, eyes widening when he spots Steve on the floor. The convulsions have receded, but the way Steve’s eyelids flicker, the whites of his eyes… 

Natasha takes it all in and heads immediately for Sarah.

“Don’t touch her,” Tony barks out, “Nat, don’t touch her, please.”

Natasha straightens, lowering her hands, but remains close to Sarah, and Tony, Tony can’t keep from staring at his daughter, his chest hurting like he’s been punched. “Sarah?”

He’s never seen such betrayal in her face. But then, then her eyes drop to Steve and that look changes, and if Tony thought he hurt before— “Honey,” he tries, but his voice breaks.

She breathes hard and fast, hands clenching into twitchy fists in her lap. Tears roll down her cheeks. Tony drags his eyes away, back to his husband lying so still in his arms. “J, where the fuck are those medics?”

**

By the time they arrive, Natasha’s three-year-old son is huddled in the doorway, watching silently with wide eyes. Tony sits with Steve’s head and shoulders propped in his lap—it had a positive effect on his breathing—and Sam is at Steve’s feet, hands on his ankles just in case Steve convulses again. Tony touches his husband’s face. “Babe, can you hear me?”

Steve hasn’t seized again, but he hasn’t moved much at all otherwise. Didn’t respond to the EMTs’ inquiries either. His color is better, but this, this is the exact opposite of normal and Steve hasn’t given Tony cause to be this scared in years.

The EMT to Tony’s right pulls Steve’s eyelids back one at a time, flashing a small penlight into them. “Right still responsive… Left responsive.” 

The other EMT activates the blood pressure cuff again and then listens through the stethoscope, eyes on the gauge. At the other end of the kitchen, Natasha stands talking quietly into her cell, no doubt to Rhodey, her eyes passing from her son to Steve to the rest of the room in a steady circle. One hand has drifted to her stomach. She’s not showing yet, an incongruous but perfectly vivid observation for Tony to have right now. She reaches out absently, gathering her son’s hand in hers and drawing him to her side so she can rub his back.

“BP is back within normal limits,” the one EMT says. “His heart rate’s still erratic, but improving.”

“He’s stable?”

“For now. Be better if we get him on the oxygen. I need you to lower his head.”

Tony nods and forces himself to sit back, get fully out of their way at last. He meets Bruce’s eyes across the kitchen. Bruce stands awkwardly on the other side of the force field, his lips clamped between his teeth and a disturbed crease between his brows. Natasha’s still by the door, Sam by Steve’s feet. Clint came in at some point and is pacing in front of the stove, so where’s—

Tony finds her on the opposite side of the room, pushed back into the corner like she wants to shove herself through the plaster. Her cheeks are streaked with tears, and the look on her face is the definition of devastation. Tony lurches to his feet, instinctive, and gets two steps before he checks himself.

But only for a moment. “Sarah.”

She doesn’t respond, doesn’t even look at him. He thinks she’s staring at Steve, but there’s no focus in her eyes, and her hands shake like leaves where they clutch her knees. Tony moves toward her, slow, not wanting to scare her.

“Tony,” Bruce says, but Tony waves him silent. His heart thuds hard against his breastbone, his chest as tight as it was when the reactor hung like an anchor between his lungs.

“Honey?”

She looks up, sees how close he is and jumps back, hands splaying wide against the wall. But there’s nowhere to go, the rolling chopping block in the way. Tony holds out both hands, sees motion out of the corner of his eye and finds Natasha now closer, her phone clutched in one hand.

“Stop,” he orders, and she stills. Sarah shrinks even further, looking back and forth between them, then down to Steve’s prone form, back up again in an endless loop.

“Don’t,” she hisses, finally fixing on Tony. Her eyes are wild. “Don’t, go away!”

He continues his approach and his heart continues to thump like a drum, anxiety arcing along every nerve. Before, it worked; it was fine. She couldn’t hurt him, “It’ll be okay, baby, just give me your hand.”

“No!” she shrieks, squirming along the wall and bumping into the block. “Don’t touch me! Don’t—”

He ignores her sobs, dipping into Extremis one more time. He’s getting her in his arms, come hell or high water. _JARVIS, don’t you say a word._

 _Yes, sir,_ JARVIS answers, reluctant.

“Tony,” Bruce tries again.

“Quiet, everyone. Honey. Peaches, give me your hand.”

“No!” she shouts in his face, crying hard enough to break his heart, furious with him and scared to death. But she can’t hurt him. He knows. He believes.

“Sarah?”

“Don’t, _please_ don’t.”

He kneels down, cornering her at last. Takes her gently by the arms and pulls her against him, his heart in his throat.

The heat is a flood, swamping his chest in milliseconds, electricity jittering just beneath his skin. Tony barely contains the gasp, though his mouth drops open. It’s... warm. So very warm, a deluge of sunlight over every inch of his body, knocking into him like a wave crashing onto a beach. He hugs her closer, feels her struggle, and the heat doubles, unfolds in crisp, peeling layers that set him tingling.

But he doesn’t let go, not even when she finally pulls back enough to look at his face, totally shattered and snotty and messy, the word “Papa” cracking in her throat.

He stares into her eyes. Reaches up and strokes her hair carefully away from her face. “S’okay,” he whispers. Her whole body hitches, and he cards through her hair, his fingertips prickling as they run over her scalp. “See? It’s okay.”

She holds so still that the silence in the room drags like weights. And then she throws herself forward, clutching him, burying her face in his shoulder and bawling brokenly. Tony cradles her head and rocks back to rest on his heels. He feels the rhythmic clutch of her hands in his shirt, over and over.

Everyone is staring at them. Even the EMTs glance up amidst their ministrations of Steve. He’s on an oxygen bag now, chest rising and falling steadily. The twitching is gone. Except for the people surrounding him, the bags of equipment at his side, he looks like he’s asleep.

The heat rolls, a steady drumbeat up and down and through Tony. But it doesn’t hurt. He can breathe. He can taste his own pulse ticking. It’s heady, almost encompassing. If he let go, he’d drift into its current quite obliviously.

He meets Sam’s eye. “Will you call Charles Xavier?” he asks quietly, still stroking Sarah’s hair. “Tell him it’s urgent.”

~tbc~


	3. Arc Flash

He always knew his Sarah was special. But it was parental knowledge, explosively proud of everything his girl did from winning the art fair in fourth grade to tying her shoelaces. Now it’s a sickly, too-real understanding that aches with each of Sarah’s sobs. She hasn’t stopped crying, not really, just dipping into troughs between each towering wave.

Every time Tony shuts his eyes, he sees Steve, wheeled away on a gurney, completely out of his reach because… Because, Sarah is here, now, and here there’s a chance that he can actually do something to balance things back onto their proper axes.

Xavier is in a t-shirt and slacks that have seen better days when he wheels in, and Tony wonders what happens at the school on weekends, if he has dragged more than one teacher from a lazy repose with his frantic appeal. The professor is the only one here in the penthouse’s foyer, though, and he rolls forward slowly to look Sarah in the eye.

She stands completely encapsulated: arms so tight around her ribs that her breathing is labored, knees and ankles together, shoulders hunched. Chin down against her chest. She hasn’t said a word since Tony forced that embrace, not one damn word.

“Sarah, my name is Charles,” Xavier says, as if Sarah’s father had not fallen comatose at her feet in the very next room. “Do you remember meeting me? You were very young.”

She doesn’t respond, doesn’t even nod. Tony gnaws his lower lip and resists with every fiber the absolute _need_ to go after that evac helicopter, to make certain Steve is still in this world.

“I’m a mutant,” Xavier continues after a moment’s silence. It’s a firm switch to the business of their meeting, but no less composed. “Do you know what I can do?”

Her shoulders hitch. She glances at him, a flick of her eyes. Xavier opens his mouth, but then Sarah utters it, low almost to the point of incoherency. “Telepath.”

Xavier makes no sign that he’s relieved at her acknowledgement, just nods as though there’s nothing about this that is outside his purview. Tony feels his inadequacy as a parent in one swooping rush, and reels momentarily with the fear and impotence. “Among other things,” the professor answers. “I’d like to help you, if that’s alright?”

“How?”

“I’d like to look into your mind. Your memories of this morning, Sarah. You’re free to say no, but perhaps together we can figure out what happened.”

Sarah’s face crumples and Tony can almost hear her stating it aloud: _I hurt my dad._ He rubs his face, unable to keep the emotion from it, hiding it instead.

And then Xavier raises his chin just a bit, Sarah looks at him very suddenly—and Tony knows there’s a conversation going on that he will never hear. Just like that, his chest loosens, a naïve faith that he has no energy to fight.

After a tense few seconds, Sarah gives a slow nod.

Xavier doesn’t touch her. And well he shouldn’t; Tony has no idea what he’d do if it happened all over again. Xavier already understands the ins and outs of Extremis as far as Tony has been able to decode them, knows what Tony has surmised about his daughter. Perhaps Sarah will be able to fill in the holes.

**

“She is remarkable,” Xavier says afterward, in the weary sort of tone that hurts Tony. “If I’m correct, she has mastery of the body via mental manipulation.”

Tony feels very, very sick. “She hurts people by thinking about it.”

“By touching,” Xavier corrects, “and thinking. But I suspect that’s just one side of it. Tell me, when it happened the first time, was she under duress?”

“To put it mildly,” Tony mutters, and then looks Xavier in the eye. “We came an inch from being killed.”

Xavier purses his lips, worrisome. “Then you are twice as lucky, Mr. Stark.”

Tony doesn’t want to talk about luck. “How does she do it?”

“I can’t be exact without more time to explore it, and more self-awareness on her end. At the moment, she’s too frightened to sort through her experience. In a few days, we may be able to manage more of it, but I don’t want to cause her undue stress. What I can gather, however, is that she has a physical memory of what I believe to be your husband’s anatomy.”

Tony stares. “What?”

“She saw it, Tony.”

“She saw inside him?”

Xavier frowns. “The images are jumbled. Like the memory of a nightmare she shuts down as soon as she thinks it. At the moment, I can only see it through Sarah’s interpretive reaction and she has little knowledge of anatomical detail. If it’s alright with you, I’ll ask Henry McCoy to take a look at what she saw.”

Tony nods.

“Given the chance for physical contact—” Xavier mimes cradling a person’s face, hands splayed from temple to chin. “I might be able to see more, but that’s out of the question until we have a better understanding of the situation. Part of her gift is visualization of the disruption she causes, though I don’t believe it’s intentional. Rather, it’s instinctive. She’s entering puberty. Her gifts are manifesting as a result.”

Tony drags a hand over his face. Fucking hell. He just wants his girl to have a normal life, just a normal fucking— “Please tell me you’ve seen something like this before.”

Xavier suddenly looks much older, beaten around the edges. His eyes drift back, as though through memory. “Yes, I have.”

**

Steve stirs, all limbs shifting at once, and then opens his eyes. They’re unexpectedly clear, and he alights on Tony within seconds. He exhales like he’s waking up on a Sunday morning and reaches straight for Tony’s hand. “Tony.”

Tony threads their fingers together, sitting up in his chair. “Hey, babe.”

Now Steve’s eyes flick, taking in the room. A wrinkle creases his brow. “How long have I been here?”

“A day.” No rehashing necessary; Tony can see already that he remembers. “Most of it was just sleeping.”

Steve strokes his thumb over Tony’s wrist. “Break it down for me?”

Tony lets out a long breath and sits back, but refuses to relinquish Steve’s hand. “You coded, thready pulse and restricted breathing. The Grand Mal seizure was especially fun. A lung almost collapsed and your kidneys took a hit. One of them failed, but it’s back up and running. They did some x-rays and a hell of a lot of scans just to be sure, but... They didn’t even have to put you on a ventilator.”

Steve nods, looking a little haunted. Tony is desperate to ask how it felt, if Steve knew that same incredible heat he did, or if it was nothing but discomfort for him. Pain. Except that maybe there was a vestige of fog left over from unconsciousness, because all of a sudden, Steve turns ravaged eyes to Tony, lifting his head completely off the pillow. “Is Sarah alright?”

“She’s fine.” He chokes on it, and Steve’s expression turns suspicious. Tony folds his husband’s hand tightly in both of his. “Babe, no, she is. I swear. But... Steve, she’s a mutant.”

It takes Steve the length of two breaths, and then he sucks in the third with audible speed. “I touched her.”

Tony nods.

Steve finally retracts from Tony’s grip, but only to cover his face with his hands. “Oh god,” he says, muffled. Tony finds his wrist, squeezing gently as Steve digests it.

“Where is she?” Steve asks at last, his voice heartbreakingly hoarse. “She’s, Tony, is she…” He looks toward the hallway, sitting up straighter. “She’s out there?”

And god, this is the hard part, the part Tony would rather never address. He gathers Steve’s hand back into his own, clearing his throat. “No, she’s not.”

Steve nods. Nods again. “When she’s back, I want to talk to her.”

“Babe…” Tony sighs, forcing himself to meet Steve’s eyes. “She’s not coming back.”

“What? Why?” Steve sits up, ramrod straight, his expression shuttering into stiff lines. “What did they say to her, who—”

“Steve, she’s not here because she doesn’t want to be,” he interrupts, and Steve stills.

God knows Tony tried. Coaxed, pleaded, even coerced. Tried to get her back here because… Because. But there was nothing in his power to allay the grief she poured furiously at his feet. He never, ever wants to hear his daughter cry in that way again, never wants Steve’s very name to send her into hysterics.

He rubs Steve’s knuckles with his nose. “She feels responsible. I tried, I tried everything I knew, but she… I couldn’t get her to come back.”

“She didn’t do anything wrong,” Steve says, voice strangely flat.

“I know she didn’t. I know.”

“Who’s with her?” Steve asks after a moment.

“Pepper.” Because Pepper has Extremis, because Pepper can touch her like Tony can, because Tony was ripping himself apart trying to decide whose side he should be at. He still itches to get back, but he itches more with the need to be here with Steve, especially now.

At least she’s taken care of. At least she’s safe. And Steve can talk anyone down, he’s the epitome of diplomacy and he understands his daughter backward and forward. Tony can already tell by the look on Steve’s face that his husband is formulating a strategy, and Steve’s strategies always work. Teamed up with Tony’s implementation, there’s nothing they can’t do.  
Tony kisses his hand. They’ll get her back, no problem.

**

They don’t.

**

“I can’t drag her back here if she doesn’t want to come.”

“I know that.” Steve rubs his hands together fitfully, his eyes on the city below. It’s night, all the streets lit up like thrumming arteries.

Tony sighs. Technically, they could drag her back. They’re her parents and she’s only thirteen. But she backed away from _him_ last time he went to the school, and after what Xavier told him about her abilities, he can’t really blame her. He wouldn’t want to see someone’s insides crushing themselves into pulp either.

“Maybe it’s for the best,” he says finally, and Steve looks at him as if he’s just spontaneously adopted anarchy in place of SHIELD.

“For the _best?”_

“No, hang on, listen. She’s as safe at the school as she is here. You know I had a hand in those systems. She’s protected. She’s obviously comfortable around Xavier. He’s having her talk to Marie, get her another perspective on this kind of mutation. Give her a couple days to cool down, get a grip on what’s going on, I bet she calls us.”

Steve nods hesitantly. “Alright. Yeah, alright.” He gives himself a shake, nerves trying to expend excess energy, and Tony is unable to stop himself from reaching for him. It can’t be easy, having your kid shy away from even talking to you.

But it’s only been a couple days.

“We can still see her,” Tony murmurs, hugging Steve’s waist from behind and resting his head against his back. “First thing tomorrow. Fly us there myself.”

“Can you imagine,” Steve says quietly. “Doing that to your own parent?”

He can’t; even at Howard’s worst, Tony never wanted to hurt him like that. The penthouse feels empty without her, too big for the two of them alone. “She knows you love her. She’ll come around.”

Steve says nothing. But he grips Tony’s hand.

** 

The next day, before they go to Sarah, Tony and Steve ask to see.

There’s a frenetic energy to Sarah’s visions. Tony feels the spike of her fear, and the instantaneous result is appalling: organs swelling, tissue bursting, capillaries coming apart all at once. Rich, dark fluid everywhere. The more she reacts, the more uncontrollable it gets. He’d thought more probing would help sort through it for her, make it all make sense, but all Xavier has uncovered at this point is more detail, and more repulsion from Sarah.

Apparently other senses are affected, too. Touch and smell, maybe even taste, and that’s... He can’t describe what knowing that does to him.

Steve looks sick to his stomach when they back out of Xavier’s mind. He stands immediately, running his hands over his face and through his hair, and takes a quick circuit around the room. “She sees that?” he asks, his voice unusually small.

“Yes. I’m afraid she’s having nightmares.”

Steve curses under his breath. Tony clears his throat. “Can you block them for her?”

“That wouldn’t be a good idea,” Xavier says immediately. “Tamping that down forcibly is only a stop-gap; even the strongest mental shields will break if the gift is potent enough, and then the result might well be catastrophic. Aside from that, though, I don’t believe it will work. Her sense of touch has almost... expanded. New neural pathways have formed that Hank McCoy has never seen before. I’m not sure there _is_ a way to detach the two again.”

“So what can we do about it?” Steve asks. “How can we get her to stop seeing those things?”

“Other than not touching anyone, I can’t offer a suggestion. But,” Xavier says, raising a hand when Steve opens his mouth again, “I still think control is the issue. Once she’s able to move past what she saw, we’ll work on dissecting it, isolating the progression of events. The first elements of exerting conscious control.”

“Eventually she’s going to have to do it again, though.” Tony nods, slaps his thighs. “I’ll do it. She can use me.”

Xavier shakes his head. “At this point, I don’t even want to broach the subject of applying her gift again, on anyone, but especially not on you.”

“Why not? It doesn’t matter what she does, I heal up immediately. It’s happened twice.”

“Tony,” Xavier says, “you may heal, but she sees you, too. Inside. She sees it happening.”

“So?”

“So, you’re her father,” Steve says quietly from behind.

Tony looks at both of them, and then throws his hands into the air. “Well, what else are we supposed to do? It’s a Catch-22.”

“Let me make some headway with processing the events,” Xavier says gently. “She’ll be able to look at it differently if she’s not so frightened by what she’s capable of.”

“Just how powerful do you think she is?” Steve sounds half curious, half horrified. All incredulous, and it’s that which catapults Tony’s pulse skyward again, the realization that Sarah might only have scratched the surface.

“Very. She’s young. Forgive the bluntness of the metaphor, but imagine a young snake that can’t control the amount of venom released in its bite. Sarah has no knowledge of how to put a cap on the power exerted. What she sees is so startling, so visceral, that she can’t interpret it in time to keep from trying to reject it. In doing so, she effectively acts upon the anatomy in question, with the result of extreme and immediate damage.”

“But you think she could learn control?” Steve asks. It’s comforting, that tone of voice: planning, extrapolating, working the problem.

“Indeed. More than that, I suspect she could use it to affect the opposite result. The pathways formed, though unique, are similar to those that occur in the brains of telekinetics and matter manipulators. If she learns enough about human anatomy, I think she could use her gift to heal at a phenomenal level.”

“A healer,” like Steve isn’t aware he’s saying it. His gaze has gone far away, twisted between awe and dismay. Tony imagines his own expression looks much the same.

“As we don’t know anything specific about her birth parentage,” Xavier continues, “we have no basis to measure the potential of her gift. And it could manifest in additional forms as it develops.”

“Will she…” Tony’s headache creeps further up behind his brow. “Will she be able to have human contact?”

The room goes not only silent but completely motionless. Tony fights the urge to look at Steve. He doesn’t need to in order to understand the horror his comment has elicited. 

“I don’t know,” Xavier says. “Your exposure to Extremis has proven fortuitous, Tony. Whether she wants to now or not, the fact is that she _can_ touch you for extended periods. Without the benefit of Extremis six years ago, you would likely have died from prolonged contact. Were she to come into contact with a person who has no enhanced healing ability, the affect would no doubt be lethal.”

“And Steve?”

“Is very fortunate he has the gift of Dr. Erskine’s serum.” Xavier gives Steve a smile that Steve only half-heartedly returns. “But as you were witness to, even that was not enough.”

It’s a good thing Steve and Xavier are focused on each other, because Tony gets lost again in the shock: Clint holding Sarah on that plane years ago, Phil already injured and trying to help her, Sarah lying in bed in Asgard with Jane’s daughters, skin to skin.

Bruce and Sam, and Natasha and Rhodey and _their kid._ All those children in the park where Sarah would have gone the very day Steve fell, sharing tools with her, tagging along behind her, holding her hands in theirs.

It didn’t have to be Steve. And they were all so fucking lucky it was.

~tbc~

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And yes, the Marie they're talking about is Rogue. ^_^ Because she's amazing.


	4. Standoff

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> FINALLY, I know, I know. Moving, friend's wedding, book published, new book drafted, blah blah HAVE SOME SARAH.
> 
> ^_^
> 
> Thank you, coffeejunkii, for your ever wise commentary!

“It’s fine. It…” Steve’s head falls back, baring his throat. Sweat shines across his Adam’s apple. His hand curls tight into Tony’s hair, sending Tony’s scalp prickling; Steve stiffens from toes to fingertips, and then shakes, that perfect inevitable judder that Tony is so familiar with. Tony sucks hard, swallows once, twice, thrice in a row—a choked grunt, and Steve collapses back onto the pillows, knees drifting wide either side of Tony’s head. His grip loosens, and he begins a sluggish massage of Tony’s scalp. “Tony. Come up here—”

He stutters into silence when Tony glides a hand flat-palmed over his chest, tracing through sweat, thumbing a nipple, reaching right up to clutch the meeting of shoulder and neck. Steve’s skin, even slick with sweat, is always so soft. He drags his mouth off of Steve and hauls up, catching Steve’s lips instead to the sound of a helpless little groan. Steve doesn’t wait, but kisses him hard and thorough, using his legs to align Tony’s body, to cinch him close, chest to groin. Tony trembles, backs out of the kiss and rolls his hips. The noise Steve makes this time is pained.

“S’okay if you go,” Steve manages anyway, fumbling down between them, wresting all muscle control from Tony with two quick strokes. His mouth trips over Tony’s and Steve tilts his head, chasing him as he ducks away. “Business to run.”

Tony stills Steve’s face, but not his hand, rides it all the way over the top until all he can do is squeeze his eyes shut and fight for breath and—and—

He goes back to kissing Steve right after, tangling his fingers in his husband’s sweaty locks. “Then you have to go see her.”

“Yes, I do.” Steve runs a hand down Tony’s backside. His body clenches and shudders one last time. “Don’t _worry._ Soon as I’m dressed, I’m out of here.”

“You hug her for me,” he starts, then catches it and curses. Steve rubs a thumb across Tony’s forehead and doesn’t say a thing.

Tony drops his head to Steve’s sternum. He’s still breathing fast. Tony could just stay here. Call Pepper. She’d give him the out because it’s Sarah.

Except bureaucracy doesn’t just go away. If he can nip this problem before it blooms into a hellish apocalyptic flower, he’ll stay late and stomp it absolutely flat. One less wall rearing between him and his daughter.

Today’s the day she’s going to talk to Steve. Tony nods into his husband’s chest, kisses it, and nods again. Steve’s hand falls to his nape. He could make Steve come again before he leaves. Five minutes, tops, and Steve would let him, even though he wants so desperately to get to Sarah that Tony can taste it on Steve’s skin. 

“Take her new John Green,” he says, finally pushing upright. He runs a hand through his hair and blows out a breath, still braced against Steve’s chest. “Didn’t get a chance to finish it.”

Which Steve knows. He’s the one who bought it for her. But all he says is, “Good idea.” He leans up on his elbow, but only to ease Tony down for another kiss, searching his mouth as though there’s nowhere he particularly needs to be. His lips curve against Tony’s. “Shower. You smell like me.”

Tony pecks his mouth, sharp, and gets off the bed, stumbling on his way to the bathroom. He hops under the spray before it’s hot, and jumps around for a moment in agonized silence. He’s mostly washed by the time Steve gets in behind him, and he lathers Steve’s hair, feels him up soundly and kisses him one last time before climbing back out into the humid bathroom air. Dries off, shaves, pulls on a suit designed to cause mental hiccups in the people fortunate enough to see him in it, and calls Pep to let her know that yes, _I’m on my way, heading out the door as we speak, swear to god—I_ am _dressed appropriately, what do you take me for?_

**

When he gets back to the tower, it’s past six. He can’t tamp down on the jitters. It’s the first day since Sarah left that he hasn’t had time to see her at least once. Now the kids’ll all be at dinner or preparing for bed, and Tony’s not about to cause the kind of disruption that would embarrass her. 

Steve went, at least, and one of these days, Tony’s going to have to accept that even he can’t be in two places at once.

He gets himself a drink downstairs. Non-alcoholic wine tastes like shit, but the placebo effect is worth ten of its flavor, and really, that’s all Tony needs these days.

Well, that. And.

“JARVIS, where’s Steve?”

“He is in the lab.”

“Huh.” Tony’s itchy and warm, half-turned on just from the idea of his husband. He hopes Steve wants to have sex, because Tony damn well _needs_ to. Nothing else will do, not with these nerves. And yet in his imagination, he can’t even get past the kissing, and it’s a perfect, perfect night lying in front of him.

Not seeing Sarah should be a dark cloud. But blessedly, though he misses his baby like nothing else, the prominent ache of the first week is absent. For the first time in days, he’s hopeful. Maybe the grief is finally bleeding away, making room for more proactive emotions.

No matter. Just seeing Steve sounds like enough. He can still feel the ghost-drag of Steve’s hands over his skin.

The elevator takes him up and he kicks off his shoes into a corner as he exits, padding across the lab’s cool floor. Steve’s at one of the consoles toward the center, kicked back in a rolling chair like he’s been there awhile. In front of him, great chunks of tiny text scroll in blue. Tony can’t see Steve’s face, but he can picture the rapid dart of his eyes, speed-reading. He comes up behind and slides his arms over Steve’s shoulders, down his chest, sinking into a close embrace.

“Hey,” Steve says, covering one of Tony’s hands with his.

“Mm.” Tony noses into Steve’s neck. Plants a lingering kiss under his ear. Steve’s skin is soft and hot, smells freshly showered. Must have gone running after the academy. “What are you looking at?”

Steve sighs, swivels a little. His hand slides up Tony’s arm and down again, up and down. “Extremis.”

Tony chuckles. Kisses Steve again, along his jaw. Again, at the curve of his throat. “Be so much easier if we could just inject the whole world, huh?”

Steve tilts his head away, baring more throat. Tony wants to get under the hem of Steve’s t-shirt, work it up his torso, get at the skin there. But there’s no rush at all, he’s got all night.

“No,” Steve says, finally. “Just me.”

It takes his mind a minute. When he finally reacts, he jerks up straight, lifting his hands from Steve’s body—and then it cuts through, as though Steve himself was the shield keeping it out. Tony backs up, a strange ringing in his ears. “No.”

Steve stands and turns around, his expression set as though he’s been waiting for it. “Tony.”

The text continues to scroll. Tony points to it and slashes it out of sight, then drags the same hand through his hair. “JARVIS, encrypt those files, Incursion Red protocol.”

“JARVIS, belay that, Grant two-oh-one-five-Lima.” Steve pulls the chair out of the way, but Tony steps back, keeping them at a distance.

“No,” he snaps, and Steve stops. Tony scowls, unable to get the words the fit around the clench in his throat. “Fuck that. I’m not doing it.”

“It could be months.” The calm radiating from Steve is enough to snap all of Tony’s nerves. “Years, Tony. I’m not waiting that long, not when I don’t have to.”

“You do have to. That—” He flings a hand out at where the report had been hanging in midair. “Not an option.”

“It could be.” Steve reaches, and Tony can’t parse it, how he suddenly wants nothing more than to slip under the touch of that hand. He doesn’t know where his outrage went, what the hell he’s supposed to think. “Tony, you could make it an option. You’re the smartest person alive, and you know me through and through.”

“Not well enough.” 

Steve’s face shutters, just a tiny bit, and there it is, there’s the rope he was flailing for. Tony ducks away from Steve’s hand again, spines snapping firmly into place. Hell no. Never, never again. “Drop it, Steve.”

“Pepper survived,” Steve says in the careful empty tone that Tony always ends up hating.

“Pepper was a fluke!” Fuck, he will not go back to those days, when all he could see in dreams or awake was the person he loved most in the universe flying to bits, bones disintegrating, blood boiling away, DNA exploding from the inside. Pepper was an accident he couldn’t avoid and still blames himself for, and now Steve is asking him to _make it happen again,_ to hand him his death sentence in a pristine test tube. The anger rolls in great hot swells. “Don’t you _dare_ use her as your ticket.”

“You tailored it to yourself,” Steve presses on, grim-faced, as though he didn’t hear him. “You found a way to make it work.”

It very nearly didn’t. It almost incinerated Tony too, he has no idea how he kept it from happening, forced it to heal rather than destroy. “By the skin of my fucking teeth, Steve. An inch—a nanometer away and I would not be here talking to you. Do you understand me? I can’t just punch in a code—”

“I know that.” There’s an edge to his voice that Tony recognizes from when Steve considers the gun jumped, assumptions made, and Tony too far ahead of his own thoughts to remember who he’s talking to. “I also know that you get this bug like no one else, even the people who made it.”

“Yes, I do! So what? _So what,_ Steve? I haven’t even looked at that shit for years—”

“You work it into the makeup of your suit every time you assemble a new one.”

“Not like this! What you’re talking about is gene therapy with a rusty table saw, it isn’t plugging brainwaves into a console or, or running computer codes on a parallel with synapses to see if they’re comparable. It rewrites your entire DNA strand, Steve, it chops you down to base elements and if it likes what’s left, it uses the scrap as Lego blocks.”

“Tony.” Steve advances, frustratingly slow, still with that hand held out. It’s starting to look like a dangerous animal to Tony, ready to snap him bloody, and he could still just take it, say yes, promise Steve things because it’s so damned impossible to say no to this man, he loves him—

He loves him.

“We’re done with this.” Tony swipes a hand over his mouth, pressing too hard, needing the burn. “We’re done.”

He leaves.

**

Steve shoves the elevator door back open before it can close behind Tony. “You are the only one who knows how to manipulate Extremis into doing what it was meant for.”

Tony can’t stop the laugh. “What it was meant for? It was _meant_ for rewriting humanity. Most of what comes out afterward is barely human at all and you know why? Because humans are inferior. They’re _weak._ They’re not worthy of Aldrich Killian’s master plan.” The sarcasm is a physical flavor in Tony’s mouth. “He was sick, and he let it make him even sicker, and that’s what happens to people who fuck around with human perfection.”

“And you turned it around,” Steve counters. “You gave it back its soul and you coaxed it into what it’s really capable of being. What it’s capable of doing for people, Tony. You taught it to heal, not destroy.”

“No, it _decided_ it was going to work for me, and for Pepper. Fuck if I know why! Probably to keep reminding me of how close I’m standing to the edge, how it could just kick me over at any moment. If you think I’m going to play with that—Hell, if you think I’m playing around with you in the middle, you’d better step back and take a good hard look at me.”

“I am looking,” Steve returns, and damn it all to hell, why can’t the man just yell? Why can’t they just have it out, right here in the elevator, get to the point of no return so that Tony can slam the door on this travesty, use their combined tempers to end this charade? They can get it all out, come back to it when it’s not such a firebrand and then Steve will listen to reason. Then, Tony will have reason to offer instead of outright terror. “I see the most intelligent person I know, with a way to solve all of this and bring our baby home sooner.”

“There’s no way to solve this, Steve! She’s a mutant. It’s in her blood. Are you expecting me to inject her, too?”

“No!” Steve looks downright horrified. “You know I’m not.”

“Well, that’s what it’s starting to sound like! I can’t rewrite her any more than I can rewrite you.”

“Except that you can.”

Tony gapes at him. Steve’s already been rewritten once, and that was a fluke, too, that he walked out of that Frankenstein machine at all. It’s by the sheerest blessing that he didn’t blow himself into psychotic smithereens. Tony is not going to be the one to shove him back into the box. “You know, it could undo everything the serum has done. Did you think of that? It could strip all of this away from you, and if, _if_ you do come out the other side, it could throw you back into even worse shape than you were before.”

“The serum changed my DNA, too. Extremis works off of already existing material. According to your health records—”

“And you looked at my records.”

“—according to your health records, the process results a nonexistent reversion rate, even in the case of healing. Conversion is the primary algorithm, utilizing and reorganizing the extant DNA. Mine is stable as is, post-serum. I won’t change back.”

“Steve, this is not necessary,” Tony grits through his teeth. “This is not necessary. She is _safe._ She’s getting help and she’s going to work through this. We all are. There is no reason to even touch this.”

“No reason at all, except that my own daughter won’t look at me.”

That stops him, not the words so much as the raw bite of Steve’s voice. He looks so much frailer than even his pre-serum photos, and it’s the drive that’s missing, the determination. Pre-serum Steve may not have known how to go about it, but he knew there was a way to get what he wanted. This Steve is facing the absolute last choice, and Tony is chopping the ground right out from under him.

“What.” He clears his throat. “What are you saying, she didn’t—”

“She _wouldn’t,_ Tony! She took one look at me and went so damned pale I thought she was going to faint. She was on the staircase, I went for her because I thought she’d fall down it, and she saw me coming and she _ran_ from me. Do you understand what I’m saying? My daughter ran. From me.” He smacks himself in the chest, and _there’s_ the anger. There it is. No matter what he tells himself, Tony’s never been ready for it, not once in these past fifteen years.

“It’ll pass,” he says. It will. It has to. Sarah’s not that stubborn; their girl is stronger than this, and how the fuck could anyone not wearing a Hydra insignia run from Steve?

“And if it doesn’t?” Steve paces the width of the elevator, raking a hand through his hair. Tony can’t believe they haven’t reached the penthouse yet. “If she can’t get a handle on it, and she lives the rest of her life like this, and never comes near me again?”

Tony has to fight to remember all the _bad_ inherent in the alternative. “Injecting you with Extremis is not the answer. I’m not doing it.”

Steve nods. “Yeah, you can say that. You can still touch her.”

“You think she wants to touch me?” Tony snarls. “She doesn’t. She hasn’t run away from me yet because she knows I’ll just get the suit and grab her. It’s not because she’s dying to hang out with me!” The elevator door finally opens and Tony pushes his way out, making for their room. The first thing he sees is her jacket slung over the closet doorknob, and everything else just dies, no words, nothing but sudden white. He grabs the garment, rears back and throws it as hard as he can, a metallic clack as the buttons contact the wall. Silence settles, and amidst his own harsh breathing, he hears Steve come to a stop behind him. “Damn it,” Tony whispers, shaky. He slumps down onto the edge of the bed and holds his head in his hands.

Steve doesn’t say anything for a long while. He doesn’t move, but neither does he go to the dresser, start messing with the clothing scattered atop it, folding it or whatever. Tony is viciously glad of it. He doesn’t think he could handle an attempt to fill the emptiness right now.

The atmosphere has calmed enough that Tony’s anger has become a limp, wilted thing when Steve finally draws a breath and comes closer. His hand settles gently on Tony’s nape, thumb rubbing over the tendons. “I miss her, too.”

Tony groans, reaches up and clasps Steve’s hand. Steve misses her more than Tony, and yet that’s all he says: that he commiserates. That he knows Tony’s hurting. He squeezes Steve’s wrist, feeling the tick of the pulse under his fingers. “I know.”

Steve sits on the bed beside him, hand still clasping Tony’s nape. “What if we ease her into things instead? Get her more comfortable with living like this?”

Tony looks at Steve, hope stirring like a sleepy serpent. “How?”

Steve glances around the room, eyes coming to rest on the jacket now crumpled on the floor. “She’s just as scared as we are. More so. And she’s in a place she doesn’t know.”

“Yeah,” Tony sighs.

“Let’s bring her home again,” Steve murmurs, caressing Tony’s neck. “Get her back in her room. Back with her family.”

Tony is tired of his thoughts freezing. He’s tired of feeling so off balance that he can’t see these walls coming before they slam him in the face. “We can’t bring her back here.”

“Why not? The professor can come here to work with her, he’s already said as much.”

Tony slides out from under Steve’s grip, getting to his feet again. “Here. In the tower.”

“Yes, Tony.” There’s the beginning of a growl in Steve’s words, but Tony can’t curb this incredulity. How can Steve not see it? “Her home.”

Maybe because he’s clearly ignoring it. “That won’t work.”

“How will it not work to bring her back to the place she grew up?” Steve gets up as well. He stares at Tony like Tony has just offered to airlift the entire city to a warmer latitude.

“That’s not—” Tony fists his eyes. “Of course it would help. But it’s not safe for her to be here and you know it.”

“You’re kidding me.” Steve grits out, the heaviness of command finally settling like a cloak. “You are not saying this to me.”

“I absolutely am. She’s safer where she is, and she’s better off. There’s more they can do for her at that school, surrounded by people who actually have the tools to help her—tools we don’t have, may I remind you? I don’t know about you, but I am personally incapable of explaining what’s going on inside her right now!”

“I don’t know the answers to that either, but it can’t be helping her to be so far away from us!”

“You’re acting like I’m happy about this. You think I like having our child so far away when she’s going through this shit?” 

“It certainly makes it easier to ignore the problem,” Steve mutters. “Plenty else to deal with.”

“I’m not saying that! I intend to see her every damn day. I don’t give a fuck about the company or Avengers business, if we want to see our daughter, then we go and see her.”

“What, like a visit? Like a court appointed schedule, Tony? Here, why don’t you pencil it in, that way we won’t forget.”

“Don’t do that,” Tony says, feeling his expression bend horribly and unwilling to stop it. “Don’t do that. She’s not a pastime. I’m not being an asshole, she’s my daughter, too.”

“Really? And here I was, thinking that this looks an awful lot like hiding, whether you or her, I don’t know.”

“Ouch.”

Steve exhales. “Tony.”

“No, say it. Go ahead, it’s fine. It’s what I do, right? Hide from my problems? Oh, wait, no, it isn’t, not anymore.”

“Well, I don’t know, do I? From where I stand, it looks like you’d rather have Sarah in the company of strangers instead of back home with her family, her support system, while she’s ‘going through this shit.’ Even if we can’t touch her—”

“There, that’s exactly my point.”

“What?”

Tony spreads his arms. “Hit the nail right on the head. Aim’s as good as always, I see.”

Steve crosses the room slowly, almost prowling. His face twists. “Don’t patronize me. I don’t care if we can’t touch her. She’s better off here!”

“And what are you going to do? Kiss her goodbye and then fall down and seize every morning?”

Steve’s fist thuds hard atop the dresser, enough to rattle the lamp. His shoulders heave, a worrisome judder that just pisses Tony off even more. “I’ll figure it out.”

“No.” He grabs Steve’s shoulder, wrenches him around. “No, you will not. I know you, Steve. You couldn’t keep from touching your daughter if the fate of the free world depended on it, and I will not wreck her by letting her put you into another fucking coma!”

“I’m not going to touch her,” Steve snarls, enunciating every syllable. “You think I’d put her through that?”

Tony throws up his hands. “Maybe not. Instead, you’ll just remind her, again and again, day in and day-out, that her own parents are afraid to get near her. Every time she reaches out, when she finally gets comfortable again and doesn’t think about it and tries to hug you, you’re going to back away like she’s poisonous? Like she isn’t even human? She can take that from Xavier’s kids, Steve, she can’t take it from us.”

“Don’t you dare send our girl— _our girl_ —away.” Steve’s shoulders surge with each breath. “Damn it, you want to talk about treating her like she’s inhuman? _This_ is inhuman. What you’re doing to your own daughter? The worst thing you could do to her right now! I refuse to let you turn her out of the only home she’s ever known.”

“I don’t have any options! Steve, you think this stops with you? With me? Fuck, I don’t even want her in the same room as Bruce, I’m terrified of what the Hulk might do to her. And what about Nat and Clint? What about her godfather?” The very thought appalls, and then the next and the next. “She floored you with a hug, Steve. She’ll _kill_ Phil. She’ll kill him.”

Steve’s face darkens with every word. His hands clench at his sides, a rhythmic, battle-ready thrum that makes Tony’s spine itch with the need to move, to just _lunge_ and shatter that tension, explode it everywhere. The longer Steve doesn’t speak, the deeper it grinds, the more Tony’s words ring, the nastier the mental images become. Steve usually shoots all these horrors down even as Tony brings them to the surface, except now he can’t because they’re fucking true.

“She’s not staying there without me,” Steve finally grates out, the most dangerous he has ever sounded. And Tony digs down, reaches to the very bottom of his bag.

“She stays, and you will stay here, Steve, or I promise you this, I’ll take her away from you.”

“Tony, so help me god—”

“She doesn’t even want to see you, Steve!”

Steve’s face goes so still, so etched into place, that the room seems to freeze. And Tony, Tony picks up the hammer and swings it, one last cruel clang. 

“Look me in the face and tell me I’m wrong,” he says. _“Look_ at me.”

Steve does. He gets right up in Tony’s face and he looks at him. The next breath Steve draws is artless and raw, and he shakes with it, the bare minimum of containment. For one too-bright second, a ludicrous thought pops in: _Steve is going to hit me._

He doesn’t have time even for surprise before Steve shoulders him firmly out of the way. He stalks the length of the room and slams the door on the way out, jarring it off its hinges.

**

There’s no way to escape the silence. Not that Sarah was ever all that loud, but Tony can feel it like a sucking at his stomach, each breath a little more labored, each heartbeat infinitesimally heavier against his breastbone. He’s never been without his daughter for so long.

She’s not even out of the city. It’s a very short hop from tower to academy. Tony sees her every day, just as he swore he would. But that girl, the one he drags into a hug, the one whose head he kisses and whose curls he tugs, she is fast becoming someone he doesn’t know, and Steve...

Steve is a hot mess.

There’s no amount of sleep that has the ability to cure the shadows on his face or the steep sag to his frame. If Tony didn’t know better, he’d think Steve hadn’t been sleeping at all, but Steve, Steve sleeps like a dead thing every night, the stretch of time lengthening in increments each morning. And yes, Tony is keeping track. He’s woken before his husband more times this month than he has in their entire relationship.

Steve’s special hell is as brutal as that old click-wrench of the arc reactor disconnecting, and Tony doesn’t know how much longer he can take it.

He sees Steve standing on the steps, his hands plunged into the pockets of his bomber jacket. It’s overcast and cold, but the grounds are full: kids playing soccer, people walking, sitting down to eat lunch, the normal ins and outs of a day breathing. Tony’s had his say with Xavier; they’re by the fountain, making their farewells for the day, and then Steve’s frame just lifts and Tony sees it, of course he sees it, an alert pinging against his skull in bright, beautiful gold, and Sarah comes slowly through the front doors.

Marie’s with her, brown hair with silver streaks, but Sarah stops, letting her get a few steps ahead and clearing the way completely for the tether to snap taut between Tony’s daughter and her daddy. 

“Pumpkin,” Steve says, just loud enough. Sarah looks up, and that tether...

Steve sways: Tony can almost see the cast, the line arcing through the air. Together, they stare, eyes locked for the time it takes Tony to inhale.

Sarah drops her eyes and hurries down the stairs away from Steve, her shoulders hunching. By the time she gets to the bottom, her hands are as deep in her pockets as Steve’s are in his. Her face is frozen in a very familiar way: she may look like her dad in posture right now, but Tony has stared at that expression in the mirror more times than he wants to remember, when there were things he had to keep covered or else parts of him would fall away until he swirled off into the nothingness of guilt. As he watches, Sarah wipes her nose with the back of her arm.

Steve grows wan right in front of Tony’s eyes, pushed by the wind now, every tendon held taut. As Xavier’s voice stalls, Steve gazes at nothing, the wind ruffling his hair.  
   
~tbc~

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So. With Steve? With Tony? A little of both? I'm curious to know. ^_^


	5. The Void

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I apologize for the brevity of this chapter. It seemed like a better place to pause than the next part...

He spends a long time staring at the liquor cabinet.

There’s nothing in there, but the thing has a pulse, and there is a reaction just waiting to be triggered in him. Should have set the cabinet afire years ago, but he’d wanted a reminder, something he could turn away from, make the denial a physical memory. Make it real.

It’s different this time. The ghost of what used to reside there is doing the tugging tonight, much more firmly than the panacea it has become over the last thirteen years. If he opens that cabinet tonight, he’ll lose a war he’s been winning beautifully for over a decade. 

Doesn’t matter that he won’t be able to get drunk. He’ll know what his real purpose was.

The fury, so hot hours before, has shuffed down to mere coals. Here and there, a flame flares up, but there’s too much time between, too much rational thought clearing out all the mud, and he _hates_ it.

He can’t believe he said those things to Steve. Tony rubs at his eyes, putting pressure on the sockets until the pain punches through the rest. He hasn’t used Steve’s weak spots against him in years, not even during their worst arguments. It makes him feel dirty, like he’s played a cheater’s game and then gloated over his winnings.

“Had to win this one.” He _did._ He knows he’s right. They don’t know all that she’s capable of. One brush against Bruce, and Sarah’s dead, Tony doesn’t care what kind of abilities she has. And Steve doesn’t play fair either; it’s only a matter of time before he manages to convince Tony of one thing or the other, unless— “JARVIS, play back Killian’s test footage.”

“Sir—”

“Remind me, now.”

There it is, soldier after soldier burning to a crisp, going under with a vengeance and taking innocents out with them. All Tony has to do is shut his eyes, see Steve seizing on their kitchen floor. Add that horrific orange glow to it, which is too easy to do, and…

“Off,” he grunts. The feed goes black, but Tony can still see it, and that’s… Yes. It’s all he needs.

He’s watched Steve get shot in the street. He’s watched him beaten down by a hundred robotic assailants, he’s peeled Steve’s suit apart and pressed his gauntleted hands over sucking wounds while the dust swirled around them, coating the blood like cocoa powder, drifting into Steve’s mouth and making him hack until he writhed. He’s watched Steve shake nearly to pieces in their own home, and he’s watched him shake to pieces again and again in a wholly different way, under Tony’s hands, against his naked flesh. He will not watch this.

He messes with the suit for a while, and nearly manages to forget that his family is in pieces for the first time since they came together, that Sarah’s not right upstairs on the couch with Steve while they watch a movie. They’re both talkers; everyone thought Tony would be the blabbermouth in a theater, but seriously, Tony can’t take Steve anywhere, and Sarah’s twice as bad. It’s like no one else is on the planet; they just discuss the film in normal voices, asking questions, postulating, pointing out flaws, snickering, leaning their heads together like it’s their personal secret. Not giving a damn that Tony has long since stopped watching the movie so he can stare at them instead. It’s annoying as hell, and he wouldn’t change it for the world.

When are they ever going to do that again?

It belts in low, right in the soft spot under the ribs, and just then, the alarm goes off. Tony wipes his eyes with a shaking hand. “JARVIS?”

“Substantial electromagnetic fluctuations in Queens, sir.”

“Yeah.” He stares at the readouts floating before him, at the red metal plating littering the table. For a long moment, his brain seems to hang in emptiness.

“Sir?”

Tony jolts, grabs for the gauntlet, then slaps it back down. That’s not the one he needs. He spins, feeling like he’s slogging through liquid, then remembers, and activates the armor with a thought, arms out to his sides, plating snapping into place, slicking over his limbs, the basest segments whispering out of the conduits in his arms and legs. “JARVIS, get me an exact location. Get me readings. Is, has Steve been alerted?” 

“The team is assembling as we speak.”

Of course Steve has been alerted, he’s in the damned tower. Tony activates the Quinjet through Extremis and feeds JARVIS’s data directly into the computer banks, all while opening the exit hatch in the wall and locating Steve in the penthouse. He’s fought alongside Steve while fighting with Steve; hell, the first six months of their acquaintanceship consisted of nothing else. But he hasn’t had to use those muscles in over a decade. He doesn’t know if he knows how to work with Steve that way anymore.

By the time he reaches the roof, his heart is tripping double-time.

He touches down, leaving room for for Clint to sprint by into the bay, swinging himself into the cockpit as the Quinjet’s engines power up. Bruce climbs in the rear hatch. Thor strides briskly outside, whirling Mjölnir idly and nodding at whatever Steve is saying to him. Natasha is just behind them, pulling her gloves on. Steve stops, shading his eyes to watch the jet lift off.

“Clint, take her around to the south, and stay out of range of those pulses until we know what we’re dealing with. Get the equipment set up for Bruce, then prepare for pick up.”

 _“Roger that.”_ The jet banks and accelerates away from the tower. In the distance, Tony sees flashes in the streets, like the lights pulsing in Times Square: no noise, just flickers against the buildings.

He waits, uncertain, twenty feet from Steve.

“Do we know who’s responsible?” Natasha asks, and Steve shakes his head.

“Not yet. Get there, scope out the situation. Let’s figure it out before the guilty party pipes up.”

Thor nods and sets Mjölnir spinning. The wind whips up. Steve squints against the onslaught, and Tony thinks, _fuck it._ He moves to Steve’s side, arm out, and thank god, Steve steps into his embrace without hesitation, clapping the shield into place on his back. They’re still doing this, at least.

Steve feels _good_ here. Tony sucks in a quick breath. It’s where he belongs.

He waits until he knows Steve’s got his grip, then locks the leg joint of the boot Steve is standing on, and takes off. 

The flight is silent, just the rush of wind. A minute in, Steve speaks. “We have a source?”

“JARVIS needs another four minutes to pinpoint.”

Steve doesn’t say anything more until they touch down in Queens. Tony loosens his hold around his husband’s waist, and Steve immediately has the shield in hand, scanning the street for hostile movement. “Natasha, Thor, ETA.”

“Right behind you.” Natasha and Thor drop down with an audible thump and fan out.

Steve glances up at the tops of the buildings. “I need a perimeter.”

“On it.” Tony jets up again, feeling halfway normal.

He’s in the air for twenty seconds before he witnesses his first burst of energy. It plays like liquid through the valleys of the buildings, snaking out from its source before vanishing. He’s closer but still well away from the edge of it when it goes again. This time his suit takes a hit, invisible and so sudden he can’t even open his mouth before he’s falling. The inside of the suit is black, JARVIS gone, and Tony watches the city flip end over end as he tumbles, biting right through his lip, thirty stories, twenty-five, twenty, “Systems reinitializing, repulsors stabilized.”

“Thank fuck,” Tony gasps, and fires himself away from the ground once more. He licks the blood away from his lip. “Time to the next burst?”

“Twenty-three seconds, judging from the previous two incidences.”

“Main comm. Avengers, those bursts? EMP-effects. Don’t get too close with that jet, Barton.”

 _“What’s the time frame on the outages?”_ Bruce asks, tense. Tony can picture him gripping his armrests with new vigor.

“About six seconds before the suit rebooted.”

“Sir, private comm from the captain.”

“On,” Tony says automatically.

 _“Are you alright?”_ Steve asks.

He pauses, blinking. “Yeah,” he says finally. “Nothing I couldn’t handle.” He clears his throat. “All channels, JARVIS. Setting down for the next burst in seven, six, five...” He lands neatly atop a low roof, braces and feels the wave go through. It’s enough to make him sway. Once the comms come back, he patches in, still trying to regulate his breathing after that fall. “On second thought, ditch the jet. Gonna have to puddle jump. JARVIS, give everyone a count each time.”

“Of course, sir.”

 _“I can feel it,”_ Thor says from aloft, _“but it does not seem to affect me. I shall attempt to move closer.”_

 _“Thor, keep low,”_ Steve says. _“It’ll likely get stronger the further in you go.”_

He’s right; the nearer Tony gets, the more the suit shudders under each blast. So far, nothing intrinsically damaging has been detected, and Tony has JARVIS running all the filters. “Guys, no radiation. It’s safe to proceed.”

 _“Iron Man.”_ Steve’s voice, low in his ear. _“How’s it look to the north?”_

“Crammed with civvies.” He banks, hears the clock tick into the final ten again, and sets down on a ledge, gripping as best he can to the window frame. The blast blots everything out for six endless seconds. Tony cranes out to peer along the grid. “Northeast, on the other hand…”

 _“No good,”_ Natasha says. _“The street’s practically a barricade out here.”_

 _“I am unable to proceed,”_ Thor grits heavily, and Tony stiffens. There’s a low grinding underneath Thor’s words, like machinery or… Well, just a great weight. If weight had a sound. _“It is too difficult to remain airborne once you have passed into the inner ring of buildings.”_

“Gravity, JARVIS?”

“The relative weight of the suit has increased by fifteen-point-zero-three percent since the team’s arrival.”

 _“Shield’s heavier, too,”_ Steve mutters.

Tony braces as another blast hits, then skips a few buildings forward with a heave of the repulsors. With that tower block out of the way, the culprit comes into view: it looks almost like a generator, small and squat, and right in the center of an intersection. Cars are stopped all around it, and it spews a crackle of blue energy like mist. Thor is a block away, the hammer ground into the cement at his feet. His whole body slumps as though it is being dragged to the earth. People are moving away from their vehicles, crawling slowly along the ground, and Tony can hear the desperate pleas for help.

 _“Iron Man?”_ Steve says.

“J, run the relative weight of the Quinjet.”

“The relative weight has increased by an exponent of five compared to the suit, sir.”

“Shit,” Tony breathes. And the jet’s not even that close to the epicenter. If Thor is a block from it and mired in, then the suit, which weighs a good three hundred pounds more, has no chance either.

 _“Bruce, buddy,”_ Clint says. _“Time to bring our friend out to play?”_

_“The other guy has more mass than any of us. He’ll be grounded before he gets going.”_

Tony eyes the readings JARVIS is coughing up. “Guys, the folks at the center are starting to look a little haywired.” People who were crawling have begun to waver, like they can’t see properly or their inner ears are going nuts. “Call me pessimistic, but the prolonged effects are going to suck.”

_“Iron Man, do you have coordinates for the source?”_

Tony’s nodding before Steve finishes. “Yeah, yeah, Thor, could you hit it with lightning?” 

_“Perhaps. If I were to gain distance again. But my aim would be imprecise, and there are many people in the immediate vicinity.”_

Silence falls over the comm, and in the center of it, another pulse goes off, vibrating through the streets. Tony waits for Steve’s decision, a habit well ingrained. And at last—

_“Suggestions?”_

The quiet this time is even heavier than the air. Tony opens his mouth, only to find that nothing is waiting to issue forth. He can’t remember the last time Steve… had nothing. He always has something, some tiny stepping stone for them to build off of. They all count on it, Tony knows they do. Then again, Tony has nothing either. He should be crunching the numbers, going sixty miles a second, but his brain feels like a wadded mess with a massive void lurking underneath. He clings to the side of the building and thinks, and, second after second, comes up empty.

 _“Bruce, how fast can the Hulk run?”_ Natasha says suddenly.

_“I’ve… never measured it—”_

_“Could his momentum counter the mass increase for a few blocks?”_ she cuts in.

 _“If he gets enough speed going,”_ Bruce says carefully.

_“Carrying me?”_

She is the lightest of them all, with the least gear to add bulk, and she’s tech-savvy. Tony’s not sure why he didn’t see it before, but Steve is already stepping in.

_“You’ll be affected by the gravity shift at the center.”_

_“No prolonged exposure,”_ Natasha argues. _“I’ll just be coming into it. Stark, I’ll need your eyes.”_

 _“JARVIS, link Widow’s feed directly to the suit’s HUD,”_ Steve says, and a second later, Tony’s seeing a shaky image of the street in front of Natasha’s feet. _“Iron Man, you’d better get on the ground.”_

Last thing he needs is to fall off a building right in the middle of the disarming sequence. “Each time that pulse goes off, I’m going to lose you,” he warns.

 _“Then let’s get this done,”_ she says.

**

And they do.

Natasha comes out of it with a bloody nose and a ruptured eardrum, vomiting almost immediately after disarmament. It’s cake mix next to the damage sustained by the civilians at the epicenter, but no one dies, and for that, Tony is thankful.

What he’s not thankful for is that the mastermind is in the wind. Probably has been since the first pulse went off. The thing was set up and left to run until someone managed to shut it down. What’s truly unsettling, though, is that Tony feels no excitement whatsoever in getting the disabled generator back to the Tower.

Everything’s gone a little flat in the wake of the attack. There’s nothing substantial left to muster except for a single niggling itch:

Between the two of them, they had nothing. Oh, he damn well knows why, thank you. He just can’t believe it actually happened. He’s been tethered to a car battery in a cave, and drowned under the wreckage of his own house, and convinced he’s just lost his husband to a horde of glowing madmen, but he’d still been able to think, to plan. Steve’s twice the strategist he is, always two backup plans waiting in the wings and a third Hail Mary for the really dark days. 

And yet.

**

After the battle, he forgoes the penthouse, heading straight for the workshop and burying himself in the dismantled tech until he no longer has to force his mind into those circuits and gears, until his daughter’s absence becomes an unpleasant hum in the background and he stops picking at the question of where Steve is.

He’s afraid to ask JARVIS if Steve has chosen their home for the night or… somewhere else. So he doesn’t. And if later, Steve’s expression asks him where he slept, it’ll be fine, because he doesn’t sleep either.

~tbc~


	6. The Depths

The gala takes forever to end. Tony just drifts through it. He and Steve are adept at slipping into the groove: all clean-cut and a-sparkle, dressed to the nines. Steve, as always, cuts a gorgeous figure in his crisp black tux, and they make the rounds, shaking hands where needed, answering to the curious and the sycophants alike. But Tony’s awareness of the event is shoddy on the whole, and he can’t pretend he’s all that concerned.

They’re lucky they were just there for decoration, he thinks as the elevator finally deposits them at the threshold of the penthouse. It’s softly lit thanks to JARVIS, warm and quiet, welcoming with a familiarity that curdles. 

It doesn’t take long to fall back into old rhythms.

“You know what, I wish I’d never found out about Extremis.” He slings his tie to the floor, then kicks it out of his way as he heads for the bathroom. “It’s a destroyer of lives. I should have let it burn.”

“Leaving you where?” Steve sounds less than engaged, but Tony knows better: he’s paying the utmost attention to their argument. He just knows exactly how bland he needs to be for Tony’s irritation to get the better of him. The worst part is that Tony understands this, and always succumbs to it anyway.

“Not having this delightful conversation, at least,” he snaps. Steve’s shoulders, tense all week, go stiffer still. “What I wouldn’t give for a little peace and quiet.”

“Oh, yeah,” Steve says, “it’s pretty peaceful six feet under.”

“Spare me.”

“You wouldn’t be alive if you didn’t have it.”

“And that makes it less of a mistake?”

“Excuse me for being the tiniest bit thankful it exists.”

Tony splashes water over his face from the faucet, and decides not to care that he’s dripping it on the floor precisely because Steve will care. They don’t have a kid who can run in and slip anymore, slam her head on the counter or pitch into the tub, he thinks spitefully, and a bleak wave swamps him. He braces against the sink and shuts his eyes.

God, he misses his girl.

“Did you see her today?” Steve asks. Tony whips wet hair from his face to glare at the mirror.

“Yes.” And she was fine. Well fed. Clean, clothed. Not alone, though not with her parents. It’s the best he can do right now and it’ll have to be enough.

“Are you sure?”

“Damn it, Steve,” he mutters, and re-enters the bedroom to find Steve at the dresser, loosening his tie. “Yes, I’m pretty sure I saw her. I was in fact right next to her, unlike some people. Did _you_ see her?”

It’s clear Steve’s done being hurt by these particular barbs: he just shakes his head and unbuttons his shirt, letting out a sigh through his nose. It’s a sound Tony is very well acquainted with. “Did you see that she’s lost weight?” Steve asks.

Tony had, but he certainly hadn’t wanted it confirmed. He kicks off his shoes hard enough to hit the wall and doesn’t respond.

“She’s not sleeping, Tony.”

“You heard Xavier, she sleeps eight hours a night.”

“Restlessly,” Steve digs. “He said she has nightmares.”

“Which he has been helping her to temper.”

“I don’t think you want to see it.” Steve is calm, matter-of-fact, and fuck him, that is not fair. Tony is a realist, not a defeatist. He knows she’s not happy, he knows this kind of shit eats a person up inside, but his girl is a fighter, and even he can tell she’s doing the best she can with what she’s got, too.

“Okay, you want to talk about nightmares?” He tosses his jacket on the bed, yanks his collar open—it’s _choking_ him, damn it—and turns to face Steve’s back. “You know what she has nightmares about? Ripping up your insides. Ripping up my insides. Newsflash, your little fix-it? Is not going to mitigate that particular problem.”

Steve shakes his head again, that maddening motion that says he’s already discounted Tony’s arguments in favor of something better. But Tony’s on a roll here, and he’s going to keep on rolling until he gets the last word.

“She is still going to see it. She’s still going to know exactly what she can do to another person with a touch. You, getting Extremis? Subjecting yourself to _that?”_ It’s amazing how much disgust, how much _aggression_ he can feel toward a single word. It’s hard to rein himself in. “It doesn’t matter what you do with it. It’s not going to help her.”

Steve removes his cufflinks one after the other and sets them on the dresser top. Bends to loosen the laces on his shoes. He doesn’t say anything for so long that Tony’s nape prickles. Steve rubs a hand through his hair and then down his face, and stares at the wall for an unseeing moment.

“Tony.” This time the sigh is quick, unhappy. “I _know_ it won’t help her. It’ll do nothing at all for her.”

Tony casts out for a response, but all he can do is frown at Steve’s back. “Then why do you want it so much?” Steve knows it’s dangerous, knows that Tony doesn’t even know all that Extremis might be doing to his own body. If not to solve Sarah’s problem—

“She can change the human body,” Steve murmurs. His hands rise, curling into loose fists and relaxing again. “What’s to say she won’t one day be able to change her own? Fix things without understanding how, or… or heal herself on instinct?”

“Then that would be good.” His girl would be safe, no one would be able to harm her. She wouldn’t need anybody’s help, she could rely on herself. Believe in herself.

Steve braces against the dresser with both hands and ducks his head. Tony hears what might, incredulously, be a laugh. “Not if she’s incapable of dying.”

Tony becomes gradually aware of his fingers digging into his palms, the pain swollen like a bruise. He forces each muscle loose and they tighten again immediately.

“No one is incapable of dying.” He firmly believes it. Even mutants who heal and heal and heal can be killed.

“What if she outlasts us all?” Steve asks the wall, his tone dull. “She lives, and never feels injury, and she does it alone because she can’t ever lay a finger on anyone.”

For the first time, eternity becomes a truly terrible thought. He, Tony, will have an abnormally long life because of Extremis. And Steve died once, left everything behind and got absolutely no say in any of it. He has the serum to repair his body, to bolster his strength. But before that, he was no stranger to loss. The people Steve has now might be the most he’s had in his entire life.

“We have no idea if she’ll ever be able to control her abilities.” Finally Steve faces him, straight on with that set to his jaw. “It could be years, or decades, by herself. My child is never going to go it alone like that, no matter what sacrifices are required of me to make that happen. I need to _be there,_ Tony. I need to be capable of helping her through whatever’s coming. In any way necessary.”

It doesn’t occur to Tony until well afterward that Steve could have meant it as a double-edged sword. Even when the thought finally shows up, he dismisses it. Steve Rogers has never worked like that, particularly with Tony.

No, what occurs first is the understanding that Tony isn’t doing everything humanly possible to be there for their kid.

What exactly is he doing for Sarah while she struggles with such a massive blow at someone else’s home? He’s here, in their home, visiting when he can and often when he can’t, waiting for other people who are not him to fix this. No, he isn’t a telepath. No, he can’t keep Sarah from seeing his insides self-destruct whenever she touches him. But damn it, neither can Steve! And yet Steve is shoving out onto the tip of any limb he can find, no matter how wobbly or fragile it is, simply because this is their daughter. Steve’s own limitations don’t matter to him: if he can’t use the strengths he has, then he’s going to get himself some strengths he _can_ use, no matter the cost.

It’s awe-inspiring and infuriating all at once. Clearly Steve has weighed the potential gain for Sarah against the loss for Tony, and has chosen in favor of the former. It doesn’t matter to Steve that Tony could lose him to the gaping maw of Extremis, could watch the love of his life self-destruct right before his eyes. Tony would see Steve die, in his arms, and Steve doesn’t care.

“I don’t know that that is quite fair to the Commander, sir,” JARVIS says late one night when Tony’s frustration bursts free again. Tony’s jaw hurts from all the grinding it’s doing, even in his sleep, and he _knows_ he’s not being fair. But it’s impossible to tamp this down. His mind seizes on any available outlet.

“I’m just trying to keep everyone as safe as possible within the limitations we’ve got.” He takes a deep breath.

“I am certain the Commander would understand that, were you to speak to him about it,” JARVIS says.

“Are you now?”

“Past encounters would suggest—”

“Yeah, well, in the past he was approaching it from a logical perspective.” Tony paces across the workshop, then turns around. “Am I the one being illogical here? Is it so very stupid to want to keep him alive?”

JARVIS doesn’t answer immediately. “The Commander appears to be less concerned with his own wellbeing in this matter.”

“Oh, he’s made that clear.” Steve doesn’t understand what he’s asking for. He’s made himself willfully unaware; he’s fought AIM soldiers, seen firsthand how quickly things go wrong, how little it takes to push Extremis over the edge. Stable to unstable in a heartbeat. “What does he want to do, make Sarah feel responsible for the thing that killed her dad?”

“Steve has never shown the slightest inclination of harming Sarah.” JARVIS’ voice is distinctly disapproving, and if he’s using Steve’s first name, then he’s definitely judging Tony. But Tony’s got a point, too.

“She’ll take it that way, though. It won’t matter how good his intentions are or how long I spend trying to convince her otherwise. If she’s already flipping out over almost killing him by accident, she’ll never forgive herself if he—”

He stops.

He’d have to explain to her why her papa died. He’d have to make it make sense, and he’d have to do it alone, no Steve there to soften his words in that way he has, no Steve to understand what Tony is really trying to say, to translate the fact that—

 _“I’d_ never forgive myself,” he whispers. He flexes his hands, but there’s nothing to hold onto, only the razor-sharp realization. He’d be alone, his partner in all things dead, and he’d be responsible for it. His girl would grow up knowing that her father had died and that her other father had been the cause.

She would hate him so much that she—

It’s a struggle to breathe. “Schematics for the X-200.”

“If I may—”

“I don’t want to talk about it anymore,” Tony grates. He hunches over the work station, shoves the thought down into the dark, and slams the door shut before it can lunge back out. “Schematics. Now.”

“Of course, sir.” The plans appear in bright blue, and Tony squeezes his eyes shut. He doesn’t open them again until his pulse is no longer thumping in his ears.

**

It’s a nice day. The humidity has taken a vacation and the lush green of the trees seems to pop as the clouds roll overhead from shadow to light. Tony remembers many a day like this, sitting idly with Sarah, and yet this one feels rotted somehow. It throbs, a heavy wound held open to the elements.

Words tether him when everything else wants to leap up and tear out of there. So he thinks, carefully, about the words he needs.

“Let’s talk about Dad.”

She seems much smaller than usual, hunched beside him but not as close as he’d like. Her fingers pick at the grass growing between the stones. “What about him?”

“He’s been to see you.”

The lower half of her face is hidden by her knees, but she nods. He’d known. He’d just wanted to see her acknowledge it.

“Honey.” He stretches back to lean on the step behind him and straightens his legs under the sun. “Are you angry with him?”

“No. Why would I be?”

He slants a glance at her, not enough to pin her. “You do realize you’re avoiding him.”

She shrugs, and that’s all. That’s worrying. Tony sits up again. “Sarah.”

“What else am I supposed to do?” she explodes, tearing through the quiet like a blade. Tony stares at her, and Sarah leaps right in while he’s flummoxed, heaping a whole new mess against that wall. “Why does he keep coming here? He knows I can’t see him. I don’t even know why he wants to see me!”

Why wouldn’t Steve want to see her? Tony resists, just barely, because it will come out too irritated. “You can see him, what are you talking about?”

“I can’t,” she spits. “It just makes it all worse. It’s like he doesn’t even remember what I did.”

“I don’t...” Tony feels like he’s staring at a void that keeps pulsing and growing and isn’t nearly as familiar as he’d thought. “Honey, what’s the problem? The real one, what’s going on in there?”

He gestures at her forehead, nearly tapping her with his finger. She flinches back, quick as lightning, and Tony’s guts knot up. They both freeze, she leaning away from him. He stares at her, openmouthed. God, it’s so easy to forget, he knew he’d been right about that, but it’s a whole new terror, seeing himself nearly fail his own test. He has a horrible feeling that Steve would actually be better at remembering not to touch her. Steve’s always better at the details.

He doesn’t want to think about accusations he’s recently made.

Sarah’s expression looks so betrayed, as though he’s hit her. He is the first to look away. He folds his hands firmly in his lap, determined to keep them away from her for the rest of this encounter. He’ll cut them off before he does that to her again. “Baby,” he begins quietly, and clears his throat. “Talk to me.”

She doesn’t answer right away. He wouldn’t blame her if she didn’t answer him at all. What the hell business has he, asking what’s bothering her? It’s clear what’s on her mind.

“I feel like…” This time she picks at the hem of her shirt. “Like I knew what I was doing.”

“How so?”

“I don’t know. I saw it all. I mean, I don’t know what happened, I touched him and all of a sudden—”

“Sarah.” She’s getting shrill, her voice amping up. “It’s okay.”

“It’s like I knew what I was doing when I did that.”

“When you…”

“Took him apart!” she hisses, slamming her hands down on the steps at her sides. Tony straightens, and she lets out a frustrated huff, scowling at him. “God, can’t you just—Stop acting like I didn’t do anything!”

Tony may not be as sure a parent as Steve is, but he knows if he says the wrong thing, he’ll screw things into an even worse place. _She’s begging you,_ a memory of Steve’s words from years ago, and he can’t even remember what happened then, but this comes right back in perfect timbre. _Tony, she knows she’s wrong but she needs you to tell her so._

“Why do you think you knew what you were doing?”

“I don’t know!” She wrings her hands, then drags her fingers through her hair. It tangles, frustrating her more. “I, I just, it must have been familiar, how else would I know what to do?”

How else would she know how to cause the most damage. “You weren’t trying to hurt him, Sarah,” Tony whispers, lost. How she can think that of herself?

“I might have been!”

“No. You weren’t. He’s your daddy, you’ve never wanted to hurt him.”

She’s a step away from crying now, her breaths coming in great heaves. “But I saw it. I touched him and I saw it happening, and for a second I thought, what would happen if—if I—”

“Kept going.”

Tears roll down her cheeks. She hides her face in her hands.

“Honey, it was a thought.” He wants to _hug_ her. He can’t. “It’s your brain cycling through receptors, that’s all. Things fire and connect in there and thoughts pop up and it’s alright. It doesn’t mean you wanted to hurt him.”

“But what if that’s the way it works? I can just make things happen! I touch people and part of me wants to hurt them.”

“You are not like that, Sarah,” Tony says firmly, and absolutely believes it. “I know you. He knows you, he knows that’s not what this is.”

She keeps shaking her head. Her gasps are becoming frenzied again. Tony doesn’t know what he’ll do if she has a panic attack. No one will be able to lay hands on her except for him, and she’ll still see what’s happening to him and it’ll make everything worse. Something else, there has to be something—

“Did you think that with me?”

She pauses, holding her breath.

“Baby, when you touched me. Did you think that you wanted to hurt me?”

At last, she shakes her head. 

“What did you think about?”

“I don’t know.” She sniffs. “I can’t... I was relieved.”

“Because it wasn’t hurting me.”

“On the outside,” she puts in quickly, but Tony just nods.

“If you wanted to hurt me, why would you be relieved that it wasn’t happening?”

She purses her lips.

“You saw what was going on,” he pushes on. “You understood what was happening, and you got away. From all of us. You were crammed into the corner, pumpkin, I had to pull you out of it. That’s not someone who wants to cause us pain, that’s someone who wants to save us from it.”

“I should have let go. I shouldn’t have touched him again, I made that choice when I knew what would happen and he—”

“No, baby, listen to me. _Now,_ you know what you can do. Then, you didn’t know. You were just trying to help your dad. You didn’t know what was happening, and you reacted like that because you were worried about him. He doesn’t blame you for any of this.”

“He should.”

“You want to know who he blames?” Tony waits until she looks at him. “Himself.”

She turns fully. “It’s not his fault.”

“I know.” He raises his eyebrows, and witnesses each shift, until she settles on a hateful glower. He takes hope from the fact that it doesn’t look like it’s quite aimed at him. “You know it, too. In there.” Just a gesture this time; she doesn’t flinch.

“When he comes next.” He takes a quick breath. “You need to see him.”

Her face smoothes in a way that makes Tony’s throat clot. “I can’t.”

“Sweet pea, please.” He can’t beg her, what the hell is he doing? But he can’t seem to stop. A scale he didn’t see has been tipped and he’s flailing. “Please talk to him.”

He can’t bring himself to tell her why, to pile their struggling relationship onto her shoulders, to explain how he doesn’t know _what_ to do anymore, if not the one thing that Steve asked. How he’s scared to death he’s making the wrong decision, that he’ll end up hating himself for it, and understanding perfectly why Steve would hate him, too. How he doesn’t know his own motivations anymore for refusing, and he’s not sure if maybe Steve isn’t right after all.

What if she can’t ever touch anyone but him for the rest of her life? What if eventually _she_ doesn’t agree with his decision?

It’s Steve body. He can do with it what he wants. It’s Sarah’s body, and she’s had that power taken away from her. Does Tony have the right to withhold the one thing that could help both of them?

_Please, god, honey, talk to him. I think we’re falling apart and I don’t know how to step down. I’m terrified. I know now that the worst thing in this world is him hating me._

She gets to her feet, and his heart sinks so fast it sucks his breath with it.

“I can’t.” There are more tears in her eyes, and beneath them wells that quelling ruin that he’s been so desperate to bleed out of her. She won’t look at him; it’s ghastly, watching the unwarranted guilt take hold once more.

“Sarah.”

“No.” He’s reduced her to crying again. She leaves the steps, leaves him, with only that to show for his efforts.

**

They’ve had a workout room in the penthouse since before Sarah ever came along, where Tony knocked out walls and rearranged the layout so that Steve didn’t have to trek all the way downstairs when he wanted to blow off some steam. Now Tony regrets its existence. It’s silent and horrible, the way Steve batters the entire room: punches with no grunts, jabs with only repeated gasps for air, kicks that slam two-hundred-pound bags into a swinging frenzy. Steve’s eyes fix on their targets like they are hooked there, a dark stoniness to their blue and a fever just behind it. His face and throat run with sweat, his shirt is translucent with it, his wraps are sodden and dirty, and he punches on without end, an ominous _thunk-thunk-thunk._

Three days straight in the lab. Tony can’t remember speaking one word in that time, to anyone. He’s tired. He’s sick and broken and tired, like a chunk has been taken out of his side, a gouge Extremis can’t even hope to tease apart, and he _hates_ watching Steve hurt himself. He wants his damned family back.

He knows now exactly why Extremis does what it does, and it means fuck all to anyone but him. He’s spent the last three days caving, studying things he didn’t want to study, re-reading text and reviewing test results that make him sick. There’s not a thing Extremis can do to a genome it doesn’t consider broken, except when it does sense the flaw, and then it breaks it completely, strips it bare and slings it into the void, so much useless, contemptible detritus.

Tony’s life feels like detritus, crumbling out from under his feet, and he can’t even bring himself to back away. There’s no firmer ground that he can see, just Steve standing out in this maelstrom with him and letting it whip them to pieces.

Steve hits the bag once, twice, three and four times, denting the canvas into shallows. There’s no pain on his face, and yet there’s nothing but pain, and Tony, Tony is fucking done with this.

“Enough,” he growls, crossing the room. He grabs Steve, yanks him around and hauls him away from the bag. Steve fists his shirt immediately, sweat soaking through, but Tony doesn’t let him get further: he grabs the hem of Steve’s soaking tee and peels it up instead, jerks it off of him and hurls it out of his sight, hating it beyond words, hating everything about Steve’s clothing, Steve’s dogged wrath, himself for never doing the right thing when he most needs to. “Damn it, Steve.”

Steve smacks his hands away, but Tony forces close again, prizes one of the wraps off until it unravels in a damp spool at Steve’s feet. This time Steve grabs his wrists and thrusts them back, but only to get his fingers into the collar of Tony’s shirt. He pulls, a ratchet of threads snapping. He shoves the shirt over Tony’s shoulders, then wrenches Tony’s tank out of shape getting it over his head. Tony meets fire with fire, hauling Steve in with an unforgiving jerk at the waistband of his sweats.

By the time they’re in the hallway, Steve’s wraps are nothing but a crumpled mess on the wood flooring. Tony succeeds in getting the sweats out of his way in the bedroom doorway, and finally, finally Steve’s shorts, catching as they hitch down his legs, the fabric warm with sweat between Tony’s fingers. Steve ruins Tony’s pants, a rip along the zipper that will never be satisfactorily mended, and Tony stumbles back onto the bed, kicking them off, angry at the way they cling to his feet. He grabs Steve’s dog tags and hauls him down.

It burns, getting Steve in him, and yet it blots out the sharper aches from within, the smarting that has become old and sickeningly familiar. Tony drinks it in, gasps into each thrust, curses against Steve’s lips. Sucks similar oaths from Steve in the pained rasps they arrive on. Remembers what it feels like to revere the clutch of Steve’s hands into his thighs, to bite and suckle in a single breath, to raise vibrant redness in skin he loves so well. Steve doesn’t spare him his teeth: stinging nips to throat and shoulder, lengthy scrapes when oxygen is too precious, when Steve’s mouth mashes against his skin and he groans and shakes all the tension free, folds Tony in half, fucks him into orgasm and through it, razor sharp and sure.

Steve recedes like a wave, his back curling, gleaming under the light. Salt stings Tony’s mouth. He clenches around Steve because he can, watches the torment flicker across his husband’s face. Watches his mouth open and his breath stop up and his body shiver violently. Steve grips his hip, digs his thumb into Tony’s pelvis and grinds in, trembling, shaking it all out, blowing shimmering flecks across the backs of Tony’s eyes and a tremor up his spine.

Thunking his head down at last on Tony’s chest and breathing so hard, in and out.

The seconds trip quietly by, and then Steve pulls out and falls onto his side. One hand drops to his chest, heaving up and down with every breath. Tony squeezes his eyes shut, sucks in a breath of his own and holds it, forcing his heartbeat to slow. He drags himself back from the peaks he just left. He opens his eyes and looks down, finds Steve’s other hand limp and palm up, just inches from Tony’s bare side.

The clock ticks. Tony’s not sure for how long.

With a barely audible groan, Steve sits up, back muscles straining as he curls forward. For a moment, he sits on the edge of the bed, head hung low so that all Tony can see is the dip between his shoulders and the red tracks beginning to welt up at random where Tony’s fingers found purchase. One hand scrubs through tangled blond hair.

Steve gets to his feet without a word. Bends over, retrieves his shorts and pulls them back on. Tony turns his eyes back to the ceiling, still catching his breath as Steve pads unsteadily out of the room.

A minute later—

_Thunk. Thunk-thunk. Thunk._

~tbc~

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I KNOW I KNOW. Sorry.


	7. Demons

“Steve doesn’t do well away from his child.” He says it to Bruce in Bruce’s lab, but it’s a revelation he can’t believe he didn’t see sooner, and the words are meant entirely for himself.

Across the table, Bruce stills. “Are you okay, Tony?”

Tony folds over and rests his face in his hands. “No.”

The true alarm on Bruce’s face is worse than Tony’s answer. He can see that up until that moment, Bruce wasn’t truly worried for them. 

But now. Now he is.

Bruce puts his pipette down and comes around the table. “Tell me.”

“We can’t even speak without fighting. We can’t talk about Sarah. I’m flying battles with a stranger, and I can’t even tell how much of it is me and how much is him. We have sex and it’s like.” He doesn’t want to go there. He barely wants to go there when it’s happening. His husband is leaving him in bits and pieces at a time. Tony has the ridiculous idea that soon all he’ll have of Steve is an empty body. 

“Because Sarah’s not here?”

“You know why I don’t want her here,” he snaps, frustration and defensiveness getting the better of him. But Bruce only nods.

“I know, and I don’t blame you in the least.”

“Steve does.”

Bruce’s face twists. “Has he said that?”

“Bruce, he doesn’t say anything. I told you, we don’t—”

“Okay.” Bruce holds up both hands. “Okay.”

“All he does is beat that bag,” Tony whispers. Maybe Steve’s imagining the bag is him. He shakes the thought away. Steve has never hit him, never hurt him physically. Never shown anything but disgust at the idea. But when Tony feels so much like pummeling himself, it’s hard to believe Steve isn’t feeling the same. “I should take it down. Throw it away.”

But if he does that, Steve might not have a reason to stay in the penthouse. Tony doesn’t know if Bruce’s silence is agreement, and he’s not willing to ask.

**

“Shit, _shit.”_ The blast hits Tony sidelong and sends him careening into a building. Glass shatters and metal buckles as he skids across the floor. He goes through two walls before he comes to a stop, his back pocking a giant hole into a third facade. Tony hauls in a breath and starts extricating himself from the rebar cocoon. “JARVIS, analysis.”

“The gravitational pulse has indeed been refashioned into a directed burst,” JARVIS says. “The angle of emission is forty-five degrees and the radius is growing.”

“Still homing in on the reactor then.” Outside, the gut-grinding throb goes on and on. Thor’s thunder crashes over the top. The HUD flickers as new calculations spool out.

 _“—on Man, are you injured?”_ sputters over the comm. Steve. _“Report!”_

“No—” He staggers through the rubble, smacking his repulsors as they sputter and chug on, then diving out the gaping hole once more. “Building’s not doing so hot, though.”

 _“Civilians?”_ Hawkeye asks.

Tony runs a quick scan. “Floors… six, thirteen, fourteen and twenty-two.”

_“I got ‘em.”_

“Sir, the targeting schematic remains erratic. Next projected blast in seven seconds.”

“Going back to grid three, altitude two hundred feet,” Tony calls on the team line, “everybody brace!”

 _“War Machine, check in,”_ Natasha says, but any answer is drowned out by static as the pulse goes off again. Tony watches as Clint takes a running leap off his latest perch, firing a grappling arrow at the next building. The swing barely takes him on into the part of the city in the HUD’s fourth grid. He hits the roof running, already readying his next shot. He’ll run out of grapplers soon.

 _“Has anyo—een—assholes responsib—or this shit?”_ That’s Wolverine on the X-Men’s shared line, answered by a broken chorus of negatives. Below on the street, Tony spots Shadowcat, zipping through obstacles like they’re not there and pulling civilians through with her. He hasn’t had time to hack the other team’s personal comms, too busy trying not to get slammed into the asphalt from fifteen stories up. The pulses are staying high though, coming after him. Definitely attracted to the suit’s power source, which allows for uninterrupted evacuation. 

“Who the hell cares?” He blasts around a building, so close he feels his own kickback. “Just get the people out. Cap, I can’t clear in time, that bus is going to take a beating.”

Static caroms through his helmet. He has no idea if the transmission went through until he sees Steve shoulder his shield and race up the street, straight toward the bus lying on its side at the edge of grid three. In grid one, Thor lets loose another bolt of lightning and the next pulse zeroes in on him instead. The entire Empire State Building sways under the impact, just as Steve leaps through the bus’s shattered windshield. Tony feeds the new set of statistics to everyone via JARVIS, further pinpointing the place of origin. Immediately, Natasha takes what she’s given and begins detangling it, lacing it up into something they can use. After what happened the last time, she’s out of the fight zone. If all goes to plan, Shadowcat will get close enough to the device and Natasha will talk her through the disarming sequence.

But at this rate, they’re going to pay for it. 

“Does anyone have eyes on this thing?” he shouts as the next whine reaches its climax and hammers his lower half, sending him spinning. The suit drops like a rock, kicks in again. A flash on his right signals silver, blue, and a whole lot of weaponry. Rhodey hikes his energy output full throttle, light blinding as he wheels past Tony. 

“Thor, lay off!” Rhodey shouts. “I got this one.”

The park’s in grid four. Open space, and SHIELD already cleared it. Tony grits his teeth as the grinding winds up again, prepares his own reactor output for the next round, and heads there as fast as he can go.

**

They come home battered. Natasha eyes Steve, calculating. Half the record of their communications is corrupted, and it’ll take JARVIS hours to unravel whatever happened that wasn’t directly in Tony’s ear. 

Across the Quinjet’s bay, Tony sits, exhausted and unable to do anything but feel uneasy.

**

“Sirs,” JARVIS says, the hint of a throat clearing. Tony pauses where he leans against the counter, fork halfway to his mouth. Over at the table, sound ceases.

“Yeah?” He fights not to look at Steve. Second nature is absolutely killing him these days.

“Logan Howlett has requested entrance at the front door.”

Logan? Tony frowns. “There trouble?”

“He has not stated so.”

This time there’s no stopping the dart of his eyes. Steve meets his gaze silently, an instinctive, shared assessment.

And then Steve looks back down at his plate and continues eating.

Tony sighs, pushing away from the counter. “Be there in a jiff.”

He leaves his plate still full on the table and heads into the hallway, already tensing up. By the time he opens the door, he has to fight not to grit his teeth.

Wolverine stands on the other side with the elevator directly behind him, his hands in the pockets of his ratty jacket. Tony takes him in head to toe: boots, jeans that look like they’ve been sitting on top of a car battery, faded plaid flannel. Tony leans in the doorway, crossing his arms.

“Well. To what do I owe this extreme pleasure?”

Sure enough, Logan glowers at him. Tony smirks, relieved to fall back into _something_ he recognizes.

“I need to talk to you,” Logan says irritably.

Tony thinks about keeping it here in the atrium, but that sounds exhausting. It’s too much work, riling anyone up these days. Especially when the effort is bouncing full throttle against Steve already.

He must wince, because Logan’s expression softens strangely. Tony rolls his eyes, waving him inside. “Come on.”

He leads the way to the left, bypassing the kitchen entirely in favor of the living room. He gestures at the couch, knowing Logan won’t sit down, then shoves his hands into his pockets and stands there in front of the easy chair, eyebrows high. “So?”

This time Logan is the one to roll his eyes. He makes it look hardcore instead of slightly hilarious. “Look,” he says, pointing at Tony as though he’d rather be jabbing a claw into his stomach, “we’re not best buds, Stark, I get that. And honestly, I don’t have a problem with that. It works.”

Tony shrugs, nods. It really does. The most satisfying unfriendship he has.

“But I want to help your kid and you’re going to say yes.”

Tony straightens. “You what?”

Footsteps sound behind him, the connecting doorway to the kitchen; Tony doesn’t need to look to feel Steve enter the room. Logan’s eyes flick past him and he nods, clearing his throat. “Steve.”

“Logan.”

And then Tony watches Logan’s eyes skirt over Steve again, widening, mouth tensing as he takes it all in, what Tony has to face every day. Tony waves a hand, drawing Logan’s eyes back. “Go back to the part about Sarah.”

“She’s a good kid,” Logan says after a tiny pause. “I have the means.”

“What means?”

He spreads his arms, looking at Tony like he’s an idiot. “Impossible to kill. And before you say it, I know, Stark, you can touch her, too, you’ll ‘sacrifice the sun and the moon for your girl—’ Listen, no kid should have the memory of doing that shit to her own father. Repeatedly.”

“No,” Steve says, too sharp. He steps closer to Tony. “We’re not going that route, not you or Tony.”

“Did Charles ask you for this?” Tony says over him, incredulous. Logan opens his mouth but—

“It doesn’t matter if he did or not,” Steve snaps, low like an order, and Tony clenches his jaw. The two of them have stomped the same damn ground flat already.

“He didn’t ask me,” Logan says.

“Good,” Tony fires back, still looking at Steve, “because if he did, then he’s sure changed his tune.”

“It’s not an option,” Steve growls.

 _“Hey.”_ Logan waits for their full attention. “You want to know what she’s capable of? I’m right here and I’m offering to let her try things out. She’s not going to hurt me.”

“She will,” Tony says and feels Steve bristle again, but Logan just shakes his head.

“Not the way you think. Damn it, Stark. Commander. You’ve both seen me up close and personal. That fight we were in yesterday? I was completely healed before you even touched down in your pretty little robo-suit. Let me do this so she doesn’t have to live in fear for her entire fucking life.”

Tony can feel Steve breathing next to him. It’s funny that their united front is still so ingrained. They automatically fall into it. That should be a good sign, but it’s just exhausting, and a little hysterical.

If Steve had his way, he’d probably eat dinner alone. But Tony won’t allow him the satisfaction. Or maybe he just refuses to be satisfied himself; half the time it’s a fight to keep from walking out of any room they’re in together.

Half the time, all he wants is to be as near as Steve will let him.

Logan watches them for an awkward moment before letting out a breath. “If either of you have a better idea, you’d better speak up.”

“You’ll let her injure you.” Steve says it slowly, feeling his way around. It’s just the tone Tony’s own thoughts are taking.

Logan nods, eyebrow high. “I’ll let her explore. The Professor thinks there’s a way for her to control it. If there’s any chance at all of that, this is the way it gets done. Now I’m asking your blessing, but honestly? I might just do it anyway so she can sleep at night a little sooner.”

It’s the terrible, hopeful look in Steve’s eyes that does it: envy, impotence. An excruciating faith. In that instant, Tony sees that if Steve had the power, he’d offer his own body up on that chopping block until the end of time. It scares Tony badly enough that he can’t breathe.

“Alright,” he rasps. Expects Steve to counter, but Steve doesn’t say a word. Tony clears his throat, keeping his eyes on Logan’s face. “Blessing achieved. Go.”

Logan looks back and forth at each of them piercingly, then sticks his hands back in his pockets and goes out the door.

Tony and Steve stand together in the living room breathing in time with the ticking clock.

**

It’s bad. This time it’s _really bad._

They leave a building in pieces in the middle of Manhattan, and ten others with structural damage. A whole block is charred by the lightning that Thor suddenly can’t control because of the newest machine, a barometric disruptor that, no matter what he tries, Tony cannot worm his way into. He can see the network but he can’t get around the damned firewall. None of the calls Steve makes come out right, none of the pieces are where they’re supposed to be when they’re supposed to be there. Steve hesitates more than once, but then they actually find the machine. It’s right there.

The day is finally looking up.

Tony batters his way into the room and goes to work, infuriated by an operating system he can’t crack fast enough, and all of a sudden there’s a high-powered gatling battering his back. It’s nothing once he turns around; repulsor versus bullet has always been a no-brainer. But it’s the first time a human presence has made itself known, and _no one_ should have gotten through Steve. No one should have been able to come up behind Tony. 

“Steve. Steve?” The comms are dead, some kind of dampening field immediately around the machine. Tony’s heart lodges in his throat; now he can’t get away from the machine fast enough. He’s no longer sure where his teammates are, where his husband is, and then he gets outside just in time to watch Clint get wrestled off a roof. 

Sam’s wings break from the dive he takes to get to Clint, the roll he resorts to when they crash through an awning and onto the cement.

The machine goes off again.

**

The mask’s hinge is busted. Tony wrestles the helmet off his head, tucking it under his arm. The neighborhood they just left is in ruins, but nothing is as awful as what his heart is doing in his chest, right here, right now. He gapes at Nick Fury, wordless.

“Fuck you,” he finally spits back.

Fury leans over the table in the makeshift conference room outside Medical. “Stark.”

“No, he has carried you! He’s carried all of you, for the last ten years, and you’re just going to throw him to the side?”

“Stark,” Fury warns again, but Tony’s reached his limit. Sam’s in surgery for his shoulder, Clint has three broken bones, Thor’s been remanded to the Hulk’s pen until his lightning stops trying to blow holes through the ceiling, and Rhodey has been left alone with Phil to wrangle the media. Tony hurts all over, inside and out, and Fury’s going to reap the benefit of it tenfold.

 _“Fuck_ you, Fury. You take his team from him and I’ll end you.”   
Fury punches a button on his tablet and flips the screen to face Tony, eyes never leaving his, and Tony watches as Captain America abandons his post outside the warehouse Iron Man has just forced his way into. The warehouse with the machine inside.  
It’s another person, another gun: Steve catches bullets against his shield, ricochets them in all directions. The person, masked and dressed all in black, fires again. Runs. Tony sees the change flood Steve’s features, the razor heat twisting Steve’s mouth. 

For an instant, he doesn’t recognize the man he’s looking at. 

A beat, a horrible, heavy quietness, and Steve lunges after his attacker at full speed, leaving the warehouse behind. He doesn’t come back, and a few seconds later, more people in jumpsuits swarm the door, shove inside with a gatling Tony recognizes. He was there for what happened next, he has the craters in his armor to prove it. But even worse is watching three of those people dart up the stairwell toward the roof where Tony had dropped Clint off fifteen minutes before. There is no one there to guard the way, to stop them.

Tony glares at Fury over the edge of the tablet, and Fury looks right back. “It could have been any of us,” Tony grits out.

“But it was your leader.”

“I swear to god—”

“Tony.”

They both turn. Steve holds the shield like dead weight. His face is sooty, his uniform torn, and his hair is damp and filthy. His cowl dangles in his free hand. He inhales, visible as his shoulders lift and fall. “He’s right.”

Tony blinks. “No. He isn’t.”

“Stop.” The way Steve says it, more of a sigh than a word, catches at the back of Tony’s throat. “Just… he’s right.”

Fury, thank god, says nothing. Tony thinks it’s out of surprise until he sees the man’s face, eyes holding on Steve, mouth turned down in resignation. It jolts: Fury didn’t want to be right. And that just makes Tony angrier. He doesn’t have time for Fury, for SHIELD or any of this shit. There’s only one person he has time for, and Tony stalks over to him, to get between him and this spy fuckery he has always hated answering to.

“Steve, it was a mistake. We all make them.”

“No, we don’t.” There’s very little emotion, just weariness. Steve looks at the cowl in his hand fingering the fabric. Even his gloves are torn. “Not like that.”

If there were more fire in it, more of an argument, Tony could fight. But there’s nothing to grab onto, nothing to block the horrible whisper of _not like that at all_ that slithers up. But it’s still Steve’s team, it’s his husband’s right, his duty, his love. Tony won’t see it in anyone else’s hands while Steve is still there, willing and capable.

For the very first time in the history of ever, _willing_ might just be the issue.

“Listen to me.” Tony’s throat burns. He catches Steve’s arm. “Damn it, listen! We all fucked up out there, don’t do this.”

 _“I_ fucked up out there,” Steve says hollowly. “The whole team suffered for it.”

“So you got angry,” he tries to reason, but it only makes it worse. He should have known it would. “We’re all _angry.”_

“I lost focus.”

“It was a nasty fight,” Tony grinds out, because it was. Bullets may not penetrate the armor but the large caliber ones dent the hell out of it and he’s going to feel like a crash test dummy once the adrenaline wears off. “None of us were at our best.”

“You were.”

“What the hell?” He grabs Steve, drags him to another halt, but Steve looks so tired, so broken, that he lets go immediately. “I was not at my best, I was—I—”

“You compartmentalized. Something I couldn’t do.”

“No. No.” Steve has it all wrong, Tony compartmentalizes because he’s an ice-cold bastard, because he prefers to shove people’s emotions aside, because he doesn’t see the point of distress when something has to be done. Not because he’s _good_ at what he does. Not because he’s a good person.

“Something I can’t do,” Steve finishes. He’s already turning away.

“Steve.” It cracks from Tony’s throat, the last thing they genuinely share these days ripping away from its foundations, and he cannot get his hands around it to haul it back. They don’t have their daughter, they don’t have their home, but they’ve always had the team, together, and Tony knows Steve’s not done. He can’t be.

Steve’s shoulders twitch as though something slithery is rolling off them. Tony watches as he swipes a hand over his face. Carefully and without turning back to look at him, Steve sets the shield down on the floor. Sets his cowl upon it. He exchanges a look with Fury but Tony can’t read it.

“I’ve put the team in danger through my negligence and distraction. Repeatedly. I relinquish my command, effective immediately.” 

It stabs into Tony, the things Steve has not confided in him about the other fights, the way Natasha has been eyeing their leader, the uncertainties he has always known about before and helped Steve to deal with. He’d thought—because he hadn’t heard about it, because Steve hadn’t said a thing—But they’re never in the same room anymore. Tony’s rarely brave enough to face down the penthouse when Steve’s in it, or to see for himself that maybe Steve chooses not to be in it at all. 

He’s _furious,_ all of a sudden: at the situation, at himself for his own neglect, at Steve for realizing he’s had enough, at whoever else on the team corroborated Fury’s opinion. For the barest, most horrible instant, he’s even angry at Sarah.

“So what, are you going to bench me, too?” he snaps at Fury. Shrugs off the gauntlets with a thought and throws out his hands. “I’m distracted. I’m fucking screwed in the head right now! Hell, why don’t you bench all of us? Why don’t you ask Natasha how she really feels, off the super secret spy record? Or maybe it was Phil. You think any of us are working at top speed?”

“No, I do not,” Fury answers, too calm. Steve hasn’t moved to pick up his shield again. He’s not even looking at it, he’s just staring straight ahead at something Tony can’t see.

“No, it’s fine, I see. You’re just going to keep the cold hard assholes on the team. I’m sure that’ll work out real well.” Everything’s coming up, all the madness he’s pushed down. 

“You’re dismissed, Commander,” Fury offers quietly.

Tony opens his mouth again, but Steve moves like he’s in a dream, past the shield toward the door. All the fight runs out of Tony and shame floods into its place. If he laid eyes on his daughter right now, he’d never be able to meet her gaze. Before he knows it, he rushes, grabbing Steve’s wrist in one bare hand and squeezing. Steve looks down. For a second, his expression opens open and Tony’s heart gives a quick, buoyant thud. But then Steve’s eyes skitter, up over his arm, following the havoc of bullet holes riddling the chest of the suit. Some of them are still smoking; the reactor flickers dimly in the center, one shot having nicked a chunk out of the casing, and in Steve’s face, the real horror surfaces, the one he’s been hiding. Just for an instant.

With a deft twist, Steve frees his wrist and walks away.

** 

Three fingers of bourbon sit in a tumbler on Pepper’s desk. The bottle stands beside it, glowing a rich gold.

Pepper has always kept a bottle of bourbon in her desk. She coddles it, taking it out only on the days when she needs to celebrate her autonomy in this world of treacherous businesspeople, or the days when she can genuinely celebrate. Tony bought her this bottle, had it shipped from six countries away nearly five years ago. It’s barely a third empty. 

Tony slumps in Pepper’s cushy rolling chair and stares at the glass of booze. He can smell it from here. The tang is an inviting tickle over the back of his tongue.

Pepper walks in and stalls in the doorway. Tony feels her eyes flicking over the tableau, and for a long, long moment, the worst weighted silence presses.

“Tony.” No inflection, no nothing. She walks around the desk carefully, laying her stack of reports down on the far corner. Her gaze moves from tumbler to bottle, to Tony again. 

At last, Pepper drops to her knees beside him, in her pressed slacks and all, and puts her arms around him. There is no recrimination; Tony could cry at the fact that she doesn’t jump to conclusions, despite what it looks like.

“How did this happen?” Tony croaks. He hasn’t spoken to anyone in two days, not even JARVIS, and speaking now strains his throat.

Her grip tightens. She doesn’t say a thing. He doesn’t want her to.

“I haven’t,” he tries, and nearly loses his hold over himself. He grips her arm. “I haven’t had any. I swear.”

“I know.”

“Pepper.”

“I know.” She pulls back, looks him in the eye. “I believe you.”

He doesn’t even want it. And he also does, if only for the nostalgia of that taste. It reminds him of a time when he was ready and willing to black out what he didn’t want to see, when he could crawl into soporific darkness and surface into reality later. And maybe the shit hadn’t always passed him by, but it was always somehow less so, because if he could survive the crap he dragged his own soul through, then what the rest of the world dished out was nothing.

He doesn’t have anything to fall back on, he realizes. God, that’s the reason he’s all screwed in the head right now: Steve is his go-to, has been for years. The first and often the only one to ever hear about the shit Tony needs to work through. 

“I have a list.”

“A list?”

Wordlessly, he hands her the post-it he took from her desk, the one he’s held clenched in his fist for the last half hour. On it is his list of absolutes. _Do right by Pepper. Do right by Steve,_ and _Do right by Sarah._ She reads it silently, then looks up. Her eyes skate.

“Tony.”

“These are the things…” He sucks in a sudden breath. “The things I _have_ to do.”

After a second, she takes his hand. “You have done right by me. So that’s one thing you don’t need to worry about.”

“I haven’t, though.” He gestures at her, then at himself, at his technology-clogged head, and starts to laugh. It’s not humor in the slightest. “I messed everything up for you. Wasn’t that long ago. And here it is, coming back again. Can’t get clear of the fucker, it just keeps…” 

“Extremis,” she says.

Tony hasn’t aged a day since Extremis, and while first blush was utterly euphoric, the truth is that the power of it scares him. Hell, he could infect his whole family with it whether they agreed or not, make them all ageless, but a move like that would destroy who they are, make them into who he thinks he wants them to be. Natasha, Bruce, Clint and Thor and Phil, Happy, Sarah, even Pep. And because he doesn’t want to steal their souls, one day, he’s going to lose them all. That’s just how life works. 

One day, he’ll lose Steve. By variable or by villain, whether Tony dies first or Steve does, it’s going to end. Until Sarah’s mutation came to light, he’d never worried about the true depth of that.

“Do you think I’m wrong?”

Confusion pinches Pepper’s mouth. “About what?”

“By not fixing this! By not making this easier. Oh, god, but Pep, I know what it did to you, what _I_ did to you. I still see it. I can’t put that thing in him, too, but I don’t know how else to make this right again.”

The thing is, eventually Tony’s going to have to acknowledge that he refuses to do it. Not that he can’t; that he _won’t._ And that is so much worse, because there is one gaping truth he can’t get around: In the suit, he’s fine, plenty strong, but outside it, he’s just a guy, and what if one day he can’t physically protect the people he loves? What if he can’t get his own baby girl out of danger?

Steve can. Steve has the physical ability to carry her out, no matter how big she is, how old, how injured. Sarah might go through her entire life at arm’s length from every single person on the planet, and at this moment, Tony’s the only one besides Pepper who can touch her. He needs that not to be the case, for Sarah’s sake, and he still… won’t… do it.

“Fuck, I’m so selfish,” he gasps, and the next second, they’re rocking back and forth, her hand cupped warm around his nape. She murmurs her firm disagreement over and over, until he ceases to listen to the words and hears only the sounds. For the first time in weeks, he feels secure, safe again, and it only makes him cry harder.

“Can’t stand this,” he gets out around a sob. “I need to talk to him.”

“I think so, too.”

He pauses. “I have no idea what to say.”

Pepper looks him over, the glint in her eye soft, and strokes a hand across his forehead. “Say whatever you most want to.”

They share a look where she gives him nothing in the way of the ultimate solution, but it’s not her solution to give. It has to be his.

~tbc~


	8. Glimmer

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh, good gawd. I am so sorry this took so long.

It’s worse now. Steve doesn’t use the punching bags at all.

“Babe.” Tony’s sure he’s not allowed to call Steve that anymore. But when at last Steve looks at Tony, it’s a curious sort of expression, not an expectant or a condemning one. It’s as if Steve is waiting to see if he should care.

Everyone’s gone today. The tower is so quiet, and the emptiness makes Tony itch in deep, bad places. “Come down to the workshop with me.”

Steve doesn’t say a word. But he follows Tony down, and he sits on the couch like he always has. 

Tony should speak. That was the whole point of this overture. But in trying to collect his thoughts, he picks up a spanner, and then a larger one. A broken gauntlet joint. A piece of welding he’s been meaning to finish. A piston replacement for DUM-E. Then it’s just easier to keep going, to not open his mouth and ruin everything like he always does.

He gets things done for two hours, feeling progressively lighter, until he realizes that Steve hasn’t moved.

Tony squeezes the circuitry in his hand so hard he breaks the fragile board in half. Steve looks carved out of marble, circles under his eyes, and his gaze is fixed on the framed pictures on the wall: Steve’s gift to Tony on the first Christmas the three of them spent together, their daughter in every single photo. 

“Steve.” And then he has to watch as Steve shivers, as he wipes a hand over his face, and _pulls it together_ right in front of Tony’s eyes.

“Yeah.” It’s the voice of someone who doesn’t want to speak.

For the first time ever, Tony has no response at all. He turns back to his project, hides in its circuits and wires, ashamed and angry at himself and so tired he can taste it.

Sarah’s been out of their home for almost two months. And Tony, god help him—He opens a new project, ignores the truth all the way through the first set of schematics, pretends he isn’t looking at what he’s looking at, until suddenly it’s all in front of him in its cold, apathetic glory, and his stomach feels like it has a hole inside that goes down to the center of the earth, because he’s looking at a display of Steve’s unique anatomy and he knows what he’s considering doing.

**

“I can see that you’re hurting.” 

There’s no answer. Tony grinds his teeth, makes himself raise his eyes, and goes on with it.

“I know it _hurts_ you to have her so far away. I know it’s a physical pain, I’m not blind, and I’m not unaffected. I didn’t expect you to react with this much…” He finds himself grasping air, as if he could just shape it into the words he needs. “Okay, but I see it’s not good, I see the effect. I do see you, still.”

He’s rambling. Great. Luckily his reflection is the only thing there to notice. Tony huffs. Were Steve here, he wouldn’t be looking at Tony anyway. 

“You think I want to watch you go through this and not be able to do a damn thing?” He lets the anger out to play, but it arrives more as frenzy, an uncomfortable loss of control. “I’m supposed to protect you. I’m supposed to keep this shit from happening to you, because you are the other half of me, and what am I if I let you just—implode or, or fade away, or, I don’t even know what it is you’re doing, but I can’t stop it like this. I cannot. When she touched you, she tore you apart. I didn’t know what was happening. You would have died on the floor of our kitchen, and I couldn’t do a single thing.”

He rakes in a breath to still the quake. Another breath. Grips the countertop and bows his head, and reminds himself how to breathe.

“I will not put _that thing_ into your body,” he growls. He remembers the files his unthinking fingers had compiled, the data streaming past, Steve’s biometrics and Killian’s numbers, and wants to throw up, he’s so disgusted with himself. “Do not ask me to tear you apart again. I refused to lose you a long time ago. It’s the one promise even I’m incapable of breaking. There is a lot I can’t control in this world, and you’re the one who finally made me accept that. Raising Sarah still scares me to death sometimes, makes me have nightmares about failing, but losing you? Makes me see what the end’s really going to be like. That will never happen. It will _never_ happen. As long as I’m still breathing, you don’t get to die. And you don’t get to ask me, of all people, to put you in such a position.” He meets his own eyes and finds them glaring back hatefully. So he lets it simmer. Tilts his head. “And just so you know, Steve, I intend to live forever, so you’d better get used to the idea.”

It’s what he wants to say, just as Pepper suggested. It’s also miles from what he really wants, but he doesn’t have words for that, just an awl in his heart that burrows deeper each day. If there was a way to wrap Steve’s hands around said heart and make him feel it… Well. He thinks that would be progress. That would convey what he really needs Steve to know.

He should go, right now. Find Steve. Say all this to him while his blood is still up and his tongue is loose.

**

He goes to Xavier’s instead, because he’s afraid. If he just sees his girl again, all will be made clear. He’ll know what to do.

It doesn’t make any logical sense, but it’s how he feels.

He has a hell of a time retaining anything Marie says. He can’t keep from shifting his weight, shoving his hands into his pockets then taking them out again. Adjusting his sunglasses. Finally, as Marie turns to face him, he takes them off entirely. “Sorry. What was that last thing?”

Marie smiles crookedly. “I said, she’s not shying away from doing it anymore. It helps that Logan’s such an ass. Doesn’t let her take it too seriously.”

“Does she laugh?” It’s suddenly very important.

Marie’s mouth quirks again. “A little.”

Tony sighs. Inhales and sighs again, and messes with his shades. “Could I see her? Now?”

What he means is, _Will she see me?_ Whatever the question, Marie leads him up the stairs toward the mansion, and there, sitting on the top step in the sun, is Sarah, shading her eyes with one hand.

“I saw you coming,” she says quietly once Marie has departed. They had mimicked a fist bump, their knuckles inches apart, as naturally as if they’ve done it for years, and Tony stared after Marie, open-mouthed.

“Wanted to see my girl,” he answers at last, stretching his legs out. The sunlight feels good. It’s like he’s dropped something heavy, if only for an hour. Tony is well versed in managing depression: he’ll take any reprieve, and he’ll live fully in the moment, no matter how brief. He looks his daughter over carefully. “You look better. Rested.”

She shrugs, picking at a toenail. She’s wearing sandals he doesn’t remember giving her. Her nails are iridescent green. God, he’s missing her life. 

“Not too many nightmares,” she says.

It makes his heart swell. “Your bed comfy?”

“Yeah.”

He thinks. “I hear you’re going to the classes here.”

“The Professor said it would be okay.”

“What subjects?” he asks, warming up to it. “Anything I might know?”

“Art. World History. Um. Film Studies.”

“Film Studies.”

Her sigh is wistful in a way that makes Tony wary. “We watch old movies.”

He almost sidesteps the opening, then changes his mind and plunges in. “Like your dad’s movies?”

“Yeah,” she says, turning right on him with speed he doesn’t expect. Her hands clutch her knees. _“Yeah.”_

There’s an earnestness in her face that he doesn’t know how to interpret, and fright. If only he were a better parent, he’d know what he was looking at.

“He misses you,” he says, but she blanches and he curses himself. He reaches for her, then hammers the impulse. Sarah wraps both arms around her knees, and Tony is struck by the image of her in this little ball for the rest of her heartbreaking life. “Do you like the school?”

She takes a long sweep of her surroundings and her grimace doesn’t change one iota. “It’s a good place.”

“Everyone treating you alright?”

“I like it here.” It’s not the answer to his question. Her gaze is fixed on the basketball courts where no one is playing, and the similarity to Steve strikes him out of nowhere: this is Steve’s face when he stands in the way of bulldozing supers, when he’s about to raise his shield and dig his heels in. But why would she need to plant her feet over an empty playground? Notions of bullies pluck at Tony, the type of teasing that goes on right under adults’ noses. Kids who are dreadfully unable to stop being kids. 

Even in a haven of gifted youngsters, Sarah’s abilities set her apart. There are gradations. Among the weird, there is deeper weirdness. So help him, if anyone’s ostracizing his daughter— He pushes up and moves around in front of her, crouching down. “You’re allowed to not like it here, you know? If it’s not okay.”

She just looks at him, and the urge to fill the silence needles. “I’ll fix it for you,” he goes on. “If anyone’s bothering you over, over this—” He waves his hand at her, head to toe. “I will make absolutely sure they stop.”

“No,” she says, too fast, and clamps her lip between her teeth. The uneasiness slides over him again, pungent but foggy. He can’t pinpoint the cause, just the effect. Sarah clears her throat. “No one’s bothering me. It’s good that I’m here.”

There aren’t many other places she could go, not where Tony and Steve trust those in charge. But— “You know who I am, right?”

Puzzlement washes the rest away. “Yeah?”

“Because I want you to be perfectly honest here. I’m Tony Stark, and I’m your dad, and if you don’t feel right here, if you don’t feel safe—” oh, _there_ it is, what he has to do, he knew he would know if he just looked her in the eye. He pauses, winded by the sudden understanding. It’s what Steve has been arguing for months. A month ago, a day ago, five minutes ago he stood so squarely in its way that he grew roots, but some switch has finally flicked over. He must have looked her in the eye a every day, but this day, he can’t ignore it. 

Maybe it was seeing her avoid the subject, maybe hearing her words trip. For the first time, it feels like the right answer. And Tony’s so tired of fighting. “I can take you home.” 

It makes his heart jump wildly to have said it aloud, to feel his resolve solidify. He made an armored suit this way, scrapping gauntlets together in a cave with no light, his heart ready to electrocute him and terrorists itching to shoot him in the head, and every second a wide-eyed leap across a chasm. 

He no longer cares if she is a danger to him. She’s been his savior for ten times as long. They’ll just make it work. That’s what Tony Stark does. He’s sick of his family being torn up. 

Instead of the relief he expected, however, her face shuts down. “No.”

“Sarah.” 

“I’d rather be here,” she says over him.

His heart squeezes at the rejection. “You would.”

“Yes.”

It’s so flat. If Steve gave their daughter his determination, then this is a behavior Tony supplied: the ability to force the truth, to fake it until you make it. It’s a formidable skill, but he has always been able to see right through it. Can’t bullshit a bullshitter. “You can still talk to me—” 

_“I don’t want to go home.”_

“Why not?”

“I don’t like it there,” she snaps, and Tony can’t help but be affronted.

“Since when?” When no response is offered, he pushes. “You don’t like your room? With your bed that you picked out, and your books, and the TV that you made?”

She twitches. “It’s safer here.”

“Safer?”

Again, no response. But the second shroud of the day is peeling away, revealing an unexpected ugliness. Tony draws a breath, making himself watch as it comes into focus. “Sarah Virginia. I don’t want us to start lying to each other.”

She won’t look at him, but her silence deafens. 

“Answer me: do you want to come home?” A blade he never saw coming is twisting into him. Panic roils: he is, always has been, incapable of leaving a wound alone. 

The fight is terrible, packed away inside her, the walls quaking, and finally, her head gives a little dip. 

“Baby.” He licks his lips. “Did you lie to me before?” _Every time we talked on these steps? Even when you swore that home was the last place you wanted to be?_

She hangs her head and nods.

“Oh, god.” Tony drops to his knees. The clarity he was so grateful for a second ago now slices wholesale. This whole time, Steve was right, not about what was safe but about what was necessary. For their child. Steve has told him again and again how to listen to what she doesn’t say out loud. She knew she was dangerous but she hadn’t been sure, and what he did to make it better just made her feel like the atom bomb. 

“I’m sorry,” she chokes out.

It hurts to breathe. It hurts to be. “Baby, no, you did nothing wrong, you… I’m, _I’m_ sorry. I’m sorry, I…” 

_I kept you from home, from comfort and familiarity. I hit a snag and I sent you away._

He’s crying before he knows it, sobs that send him swaying. In spite of himself, in spite of his Steve-induced moral compass, he’s somehow turned into his father.

 _Please, God. Anything but that._ The whole world goes silent except for the ringing in his ears.

Sarah touches him. Tony jerks up in time to see her wince. But she holds on, hand heavy on his shoulder, and his whole body lights up within, that _burntingleheat_ radiating from his belly. It shocks him silent, and when she finally lifts her head, her eyes are wide. 

“I can see you healing,” she whispers.

It escapes from him with a raw whine; he drags her forward, crushes her to him, and she cries too, but her arms wrap tight and she hugs him back, hard enough to hurt. 

**

It’s a battle now, not to rip her away from the hell he’s put her in. But it’s not sane. She stays, one more night at least, and Tony has to accept it because Xavier gives him no other option.

“There are things that need to be done,” the man says, damnably calm. “People to prepare and changes to be made. It won’t be like it was before.”

He fucking knows that. He may have just broken into a blubbering mess in Xavier’s office, but he’s not an idiot. And when he takes a minute to breathe, he also knows Xavier is right. 

People to prepare and changes to be made. The first change is how he’s been behaving toward Steve. Tony drums his fingers against the armrest as his driver takes him home. Somewhere along the way, he’d forgotten the most important part: that this is not about him or Steve and how much they’re hurting each other. It’s always been about Sarah. He hasn’t been paying attention.

He’ll tell Steve he’s bringing her home. Not because Steve won, but because it was never supposed to be a battle at all. He always loses sight of that with Steve and he’s still not sure why. But now he’s going to fold wholeheartedly. He’s been an iron-hearted idiot, but he can still fix this. 

There’s time. 

“Bruce.” Bruce will be the main issue, but they’re uncommonly smart guys, surely they can work out how to keep a couple of people apart in a tower this size. New code for JARVIS, he decides, involving the force-fields he initially set up to cage the Hulk. But Sarah is the only thing that needs protection from anything, so he’ll protect her, and that involves more than just force-fields. It’ll take time for the team to adjust to the idea, and she’s been gone for weeks. He can’t just spring her return on everyone. 

But he wants to. He wants to go back, snap her up and haul her home, and damn the consequences. 

“I was wrong,” Tony breathes, pacing the elevator as it rises. “Steve, I was wrong, you were right, and I’m fixing it. Please don’t think I’m the sort of—” He swallows that down, chooses resolution instead of entreaty. “I am not the sort of father who does this to their kid.” He had reasons for his decision, sound ones, but they don’t seem to matter anymore. The ones he remembers feel so tepid, not the sort of thing that would have Tony pushing _his baby_ away. “God, the whole world should have had to be ending for me to do that,” he mutters, and rakes a hand viciously through his hair.

“It had to be done.” Maybe at the time, it did. But did he really have to do it?

He thinks of Steve convulsing on the tiles and reminds himself that he was right. But this is what being right has done to his family. “J, is he—is he?” 

“Yes, sir.” It’s a good thing JARVIS is fluent. “He is in the bedroom.”

Tony lets go of the handrail and makes himself breathe. He has plunged into the bloodiest of battles with barely a blink, but the prospect of this one ratchets up and down his spine. Steve has every right to hate him, to respond as he has been doing, and it’s only just now becoming clear to Tony. “End game,” he whispers. “Concentrate on the goal.”

Twilight is stealing up the sides of the Tower, and the penthouse is dark. It’ll be a while before the sun sinks completely out of sight, though, and what light there is lies heavy and golden across the rug. Tony kicks off his shoes and makes his way to their room on jittery legs.

Steve is in their bed. The shirt is the threadbare one he wears to sleep in, the covers pulled up under his arms, but if not for the rise and fall of his chest, Tony would think he was dead. Steve’s eyes don’t even flicker. Tony sheds his jacket, his pants and shirt, and climbs into bed in his boxers, feeling utterly bare. Steve’s heat is a miserable tease, blood from a wound that has been leeching for weeks. It’s all Tony can do not to reach out and touch what has for so long been his. He stares at Steve, poleaxed, trying to speak the words. _I was wrong. I was wrong, you were right, and I’m… I’m…_

It all flies out of his mind.

“Steve, I can’t take this,” he gasps, battering through the silence. He drags in a breath, and everything rushes out at once. “It’s the worst thing I’ve ever felt, I don’t know what to do anymore, baby, I can’t do this. Oh god, please, please, I know what I did, but I can’t stand you hating me, you’re my everything—”

As he babbles, a strange sort of light comes back into Steve’s face: he’s surfacing, coming up from way too deep. “Tony,” he whispers. He turns over stiffly, as though his body is forty years older. He grips Tony’s arms, helpless little clenches. “Tony?”

“You were right. Please, I don’t want you to—” 

“I don’t… hate you.” He studies Tony, and the disbelief in his eyes mounts to horror. “You think I hate _you.”_

Tony’s mouth works but nothing else comes out. Steve struggles up onto his elbows, and through it all, Tony’s mind jitters in place, thoughts half formed, actions completely out of reach. He can’t move. He is actually incapable of moving.

Steve reaches for him, then shies away at the last instant and covers his face with his hands. He bows in on himself in a way a man of his stature should never be able to, and his shoulders shudder.

“Oh god,” Tony hears him whisper. “Oh god.”

He’s never seen Steve truly break down before, and wonders if that’s what’s happening now. He touches Steve’s arm, but doesn’t know what to say. Beneath his fingers, Steve’s skin shivers into gooseflesh.

“I could never hate you.” Even muffled, Steve’s voice sounds incredulous, the thought completely alien. “Hell. Tony, I hate myself.”

What? “Why?”

“I am so fucking stubborn. Sometimes I don’t know how you can look at me.”

Contrary to popular belief, Steve swears somewhat often: at his phone, at traffic, during battle. Hearing Steve swear so caustically at himself… Tony can’t argue; he can’t really think. 

“I keep trying to do the right thing for her. For my family.” Steve stares down at his hands. “But I can’t even keep my team together. Everything I’m doing... It doesn’t help anyone. It doesn’t do a damn thing.”

“That’s not…” Tony clears his throat. “That’s not what’s happening here.” _I’m the one in the way, I’m the one who screws everything up. Never you._ “I didn’t give your plan a chance. I just...”

“Sent her away.”

He doesn’t want to hear this out loud. He squeezes his eyes shut, but a hand settles on his shoulder, holding him in place. 

“I could never have done that,” Steve says, and when Tony looks up, Steve’s smile is very faint, very sad. But what it isn’t, is angry. And that grates.

“No, you _wouldn’t_ have done that. There’s a difference, Steve.”

“And what have I accomplished?” Steve bulls on. “You, you kept her out of danger, you got her help. You improved her situation. I put all my effort into undoing that.”

“I shut you down,” Tony forces out. This has to be said, even if he can barely look at Steve while saying it.

“No, you were right. It wasn’t safe for her to stay here. I wanted her here for me, so I could look myself in the eye. I wouldn’t have been able to stay away.”

“You’ve stayed away from her as it is.”

“Because of the way she _looks_ at me,” Steve says, and it breaks, and Tony can’t help but tug Steve to him, wrap both arms around him and hold him as close as he can get.

“I’m sorry,” he whispers, over and over into Steve’s ear. It’s horrendous, using Sarah’s estrangement against Steve like that, it’s _vile._ “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.”

“Don’t be,” Steve sniffs. “You did what had to be done.”

“That’s not what I did. I hate what I did.”

“Well, I did my damnedest to stop you, so what is that? I didn’t even try to work with you. You were just… wrong.” Steve takes a deep breath. “I don’t know why that is. Fifteen years and I don’t know why.”

Neither does Tony. “You were right to try,” he croaks. “I needed to be stopped.”

Steve sighs. He shakes his head, but doesn’t respond. Tony tries to take heart in the fact that this time, maybe he’s not too late to fix the biggest and worst part of this.

“I get it now,” he whispers. “I know what I did to you, and to her. I’m going to fix it.”

His husband searches his eyes with a staggering openness. “God. I love you so much.” 

To Tony’s ears, it’s not Steve’s voice. He doesn’t even think Steve heard him. He takes Steve’s face in both hands. 

“You _listen_ to me.” The panic is rising again, just like it used to, ages ago after that hole in the sky. “I took her away from you,” giving Steve a little shake with each word. He can’t be absolved of this. He deserves Steve’s hatred, just as his father deserved his mother’s.

Steve takes hold of his face, too. “Yes. You did.” His thumbs stroke once over Tony’s cheeks. “How is it that in spite of everything, you’re _always_ the man I need you to be?”

The sob breaks straight out of him. He ducks his head, but Steve catches him and folds them together. He kisses Tony’s brow and cheek and nose, and all the while, Tony cries, sure that this time, he’s ruined beyond repair.

“Doesn’t matter what I want,” Steve murmurs into his hair. “You see right through me. You always give me what I need.”

Not possible. He hurts Steve. That’s what he does. He thinks only of himself. But he can’t hold onto it. Something else is welling up, warm and inescapable, drowning the rest. Steve is still touching him, after all this, still holding him. Still here. He kisses Tony fervently on the mouth, robs him of breath. But not of thought. Tony feels and thinks through every beautiful inch.

A lot’s been said about him in fifty-seven years, by himself and by others. He doesn’t think he’s ever been more complimented in his life. 

~tbc~

**Author's Note:**

> Title from the English translation of the Welsh folk song [Ar Hyd y Nos](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ar_Hyd_y_Nos).


End file.
